(CLIMATE CHANGE DISPATCH)  –  The United Nations (UN) has delivered its latest verdict on the measures necessary to save the world from global warming and the news is as grim as it is predictable and wearisomely familiar:

By James Delingpole, Breitbart London

• More regulation from “experts”, technocrats and bureaucrats at supranational organisations, such as the one whose initials begin with U and end with N.
• More taxpayer subsidies for expensive, inefficient renewable energy.
• More nuclear power (with shale gas used as a transitional fuel to replace coal).
• The abandonment of fossil fuels.
• Less meat consumption.
• A single, globally-regulated price for carbon dioxide.
• More local-government-enforced walking, cycling and public transportation.
• More back-door wealth redistribution from the West to the developing world in the name of “sustainability”
• All at a cost to the global economy of up to 3.7 per cent of GDP by 2030, provided we act now.

These are the recommendations of Working Group III of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due to be officially announced in Berlin on Monday.

The report notes that almost half of the rise in post-industrial anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 levels since 1750 occurred during the last forty years. Therefore, it argues, a dramatic decarbonization of the world economy – including more renewable energy and less fossil fuel – must begin immediately if global warming is to be kept below 2 degrees C by the end of the century.

This action will set back economic growth, involve significant “behavioural change” and “devalue fossil fuel assets”, the report admits. But only with “major institutional and technological changes” can the world avert an even greater threat. If no action is taken, it warns, temperatures may rise by as much as 4.8 degrees C by 2100.

“There is a clear message from science: to avoid dangerous interference with the climate system we need to move away from business as usual,” said Germany’s Otmar Edenhofer, one of the three co-chairs of the report.

However, Edenhofer’s claim sits somewhat at odds with the evidence produced in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report’s two earlier sections.

The Working Group I report, released in September last year, admitted that there has been an inexplicable pause in global warming since 1997, which none of its computer models predicted. (In other words, the entire basis of man-made-global warming theory – which underpins Working Group III’s demands for “decarbonisation” – may depend on a flawed assumption, unsupported by real-world evidence).

The Working Group II report, released last month, said that the cost of “global warming” may not be nearly so great as earlier, hysterical reports had claimed: perhaps as little as 0.2 per cent of GDP by the end of the century. Even if you take the report’s upper estimate of the economic costs of global warming – 2.0 per cent of GDP – that still means that it will take less than one year’s economic growth to wipe out ALL the economic damage that global warming can muster.

This makes a mockery of the suggestion by Working Group III that in order to keep global temperature increases below 2 degrees C by the end of the century, nearly 4 per cent of GDP must be spent on decarbonization measures. Clearly – if Working Group II is correct – it would be much cheaper and less economically damaging to do nothing.

“The report is written in extreme language, of course it is, because that is what the IPCC does,” said Benny Peiser of the independent, London-based think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation. “But what is unusual about this one is its support for nuclear energy and shale gas – for which the greens will hate it.”

He added: “Not that any of this matters. The IPCC is longer taken seriously by governments around the world and decarbonization has ceased to be one of their major priorities. Thanks to the crisis in the Ukraine and the state of the global economy, they are now much more interested in energy security and economic competitiveness than they are in ‘combating climate change.'”