Dr. Rabett has translated Ottmar Edenhofer’s Süddeutscher Zeitung interview from German. Excerpt:
OE: Take coal for example. Worldwide there are about 12, 000 gigatons of coal in the ground. If we want to meet the goal of not warming by more than two degrees we can only put about 230 gigatons into the atmosphere by the end of the century. That means that most of the coal reserves cannot be used. The science has been clear on this for a very long time. In politics, until now, no one is has been willing to say this in public.
SZ: Countries rich in natural resources will hardly want to cooperate with this.
OE: Until now the industrial countries have use the atmosphere cost free and ignored the negative implications. Those who have coal, oil and gas reserves will not be happy with an ambitious climate policy because they have profited from the cost free use of the atmosphere. However, every structural change since the industrial revolution has lead to a redistribution of wealth.
It’s wastes little words and I recommend it.
Given these projections by alarmists have been generally shown to be exaggerated intentionally by the climategate miscreants, these sort of assumptions fail to retain much credence. CO2 won’t warm the Earth by 2 degrees because it can’t accomplish that without a very high positive feedback from water vapor, however the observational record shows that water vapor actually has a negative feedback on temperature. Climate models and climate reality do not agree on this, but the alarmists are throwing out the observational records and basing their predictions on their flawed models.