Richard Tol reports that landlocked countries vigorously protested at IPCC meetings that they too would suffer from sea level rise!
This was because the international climate negotiations of 2013 in Warsaw concluded that poor countries might be entitled to compensation for the impacts of climate change.
The assessment of the size of those impacts and hence any compensation led to an undignified bidding war among delegations – my country is more vulnerable than yours. Landlocked countries had no intention of missing out.
The IPCC is a typical multilateral meeting process from Tol’s description:
- Many countries send a single person delegation.
- Some countries can afford to send many delegates.
- They work in shifts, exhausting the other delegations with endless discussions about trivia, so that all important decisions are made in the final night with only a few delegations left standing.
Naturally, all inconvenient truths are vetoed, as Tol explains, listing the following omissions and redrafts of the Summary for Policy Makers:
- it omits to say that better cultivars and improved irrigation increase crop yields;
- it shows the impact of sea level rise on the most vulnerable country, but does not mention the average;
- it emphasizes the impacts of increased heat stress but downplays reduced cold stress; and
- it warns about poverty traps, violent conflict and mass migration without much support in the literature.
Tol then aptly states his position on it all:
Alarmism feeds polarization.
Climate zealots want to burn heretics of global warming on a stick.
Others only see incompetence and conspiracy in climate research, and nepotism in climate policy.
A polarized debate is not conducive to enlightened policy in an area as complex as climate change – although we only need a carbon tax, and a carbon tax only, that applies to all emissions and gradually and predictably rises over time.
HT: Catallaxyfiles
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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