Is climate change the most important global problem we face?
This seems on its face a good question. Economists like Bjorn Lomborg take this reductionist recipe, spice it with an unshakable confidence in future growth, and conclude that climate should be low on our list of priorities.
Lomborg's arguments follow from his assumptions. If his conclusions are wrong as they appear, perhaps the logic is wrong, or the data, or the underlying premises. All of these are good places for skeptical inquiry, and may be fruitful, but there is yet another place to look. I suggest that Lomborg asks the wrong question.
Is greenhouse gas accumulation important than water security, food security, global health, or peace? Phrased that way, of course not. Climate is clearly in last place on such a list. It doesn't require a team of Nobel laureates in economics to make the determination. The trouble is that these aren't really separate questions at all!
If the 21st century goes badly, but not so badly that history comes to an end altogether, the disaster will be called a "war" or "anarchy" No matter which part of our portfolio as planet managers we neglect, failure will eventually come out as vicious, stupid, violent squabbles between mutually hostile groups.
Peace (or "free trade" as the economists insist on calling it) depends on food, water and health every bit as much as it depends on universal tolerance and a modicum of mutual respect. Roughly speaking, peace is a name for success and war is a name for failure.
War arises from two main causes: intolerant cultures and poverty. Poverty is almost always a factor.
Who is so poor that they become violently angry at people who are less poor than themselves? People who lack food, water, shelter, and medicine.
So, if we end up badly, the proximate cause will be resource contention; we will be fighting each other for food or water. We may think we are fighting over principle or religion, but in fact we will be fighting over table scraps.
There is some maximum population that the planet can support agriculturally. The limiting factor appears to be fresh water. In many places, water is obtained extractively rather than sustainably. Many argue that we already have exceeded our long-term carrying capacity. Some soil management practices are also extractive; depleting soils may also play a role in limiting population (see Joel Cohen's magnificent book How Many People Can the Earth Support?).
Now consider what the impacts of climate change are on food and water security. As rainfall belts shift around, as the ocean circulation wobbles around from one year to another, annual climates will become unpredictable. Severe local events will increase as a consequence of te increased energy content of the wetter atmosphere, but subtropical dry belts will grow, and may show a marked wander from year to year. Pest ranges will broaden. Huge areas may become unsuitable for agriculture altogether. This appears to be happening even now in most of Australia. Meanwhile, coastal infrastructure will be under severe stress from sea-level rise.
None of this will be good for food, water, or medicine.
Climate change will not kill us before other problems do, but those other problems will have been greatly exacerbated by climate change. Investment in climate change is investment in food, water, health, and peace. That's why the dichotomy that Lomborg proposes is nonsensical.
Interestingly, Lomborg is now further stacking the deck by limiting the question to five-year windows.
We don't live in an economy; that's an abstraction, a theory that is useful for some purposes and not others. We live on a planet, in fact, a biosphere, a unique collection of solids and liquids that miraculously has given birth to many amazing species, and most perplexingly, to ourselves. In the context of a billion year miracle we have no right to limit our thinking to five-year windows.
New interactive map shows devastating effects of global temperature rise
Comments
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David Roberts Posted 6:40 am
22 Apr 2007
The fact that Lomborg gets away with this -- that his argument has such intuitive appeal -- points up how difficult a problem global warming is.
Global warming does not, in and of itself, do anything bad. You can never point to an event and say, "there, that's global warming." It just makes other bad things incrementally more likely to happen.
So, for instance, it make droughts worse. But if you really want to fight the effects of drought, there are other things you could do that could have more immediate effects (changes in agriculture, land use, etc.). Same thing for severe storms -- you want to reduce severe storm damage, you change insurance laws, settlement patterns, etc. You want to address poverty, you change development aid, political reform, etc.
Fighting global warming will never be the fastest or most effective way of reducing any particular harm, at least in the short- or medium-term. But if we think that way, we'll never have reason to fight global warming, and then we'll be screwed.
In other words, global warming challenges our decision-making habits at the most fundamental level.
www.grist.org
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Zarkov Posted 9:16 am
22 Apr 2007
Yes Australia will be a write-off in three years time
>> we will be fighting over table scraps. >>>>
Already happening in the West and East
>> Global warming does not, in and of itself, do anything bad. >>>
LOL, global climate change has been upsetting people for over a hundred years..... in the last 3 years it has exploded... in the next 2 years... and then the last year.... GCC will cause mankind to bring an end to civilisation.
Not long to wait.
>> Fighting global warming will never be the fastest or most effective way of reducing any particular harm, at least in the short- or medium-term. >>>
Already many people are fighting, because they have no HOPE, no food and water
True, fixing GCC today would not immediately change tomorrow, but it would change the day after.
IMO, GCC is the world's number ONE
there is nothing more important for the world of LIFE. Starvation and wars, are but blips on the screen... GCC is equivalent to cutting the power.
FINISH.
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JMG Posted 10:45 am
22 Apr 2007
If we are going to survive, we have to become acutely conscious of the role that economists play as the secular priests of the Growth cult, so that we have some context for understanding their spiel.
Just as Pat Robertson posits Jesus as the solution to all ills of the world--and welcomes all problems as an opportunity to sell the solution, and disdains any competing belief system that does not put Jesus at the top--economists worship growth and view anything that shows growth as less than divine as heresy.
Like all witch doctors, the economists are sometimes in the neighborhood when something goes right, and they immediately claim credit. But when something goes wrong, the fault is never with them, it's always with the unsufficiently faithful patients, who failed to implement the nostrums properly, displeasing the gods.
Also, David, you wrote:
Global warming does not, in and of itself, do anything bad. You can never point to an event and say, "there, that's global warming." It just makes other bad things incrementally more likely to happen.
This is exactly right, and is another reason that environmentalists need to understand how Big Tobacco fought the science of health for decades. The number one problem with getting a grip on tobacco is that cancers don't carry markers for causation that show up on a slide; rather, the causes are only made clear in a statistical study.... Just as hurricanes don't arrive carrying banners saying "Brought to you by single-occupant vehicles and the people who drive them" or "Sponsored by Ford."
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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Steven T Posted 11:06 am
22 Apr 2007
In the end I don't think you can adequately respond to global warming with our current structures of governance, particularly here in the U.S. We really do need significantly different constitutional foundations. Yet I don't see much move in that direction, e.g., most discussions about globlal warming tend to be rather technocratic in nature.
To my way of thinking global warming is ultimately grounded in a political question: Who gets and who pays? To hold that question rightly you must view the issue from trans-generational, global and biospheric perspectives.
Challenging Lomborg's myopic thinking is useful. However, we also need to stretch our imaginations to envision the systems of governance we will need to make meaningful progress on this issue. Such exercises were the genesis of the Great Society, the New Deal . . . and even the American revolution.
The Bushies know how to think big. What about us?
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GreyFlcn Posted 11:52 am
22 Apr 2007
One of the key arguements used by your general pack of Exxon lobbyists, is that
"Higher temperatures means more rainfall. Thus helping remove starvation."
Apparently thats patently false. (Suprise suprise)
Hotter oceans means more rain that condenses and rains out before it reaches the land. (Aka less rainfall on land)
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Nucbuddy Posted 12:15 pm
22 Apr 2007
Thus it might represent healthy selective-pressure, in which case greenhouse-gas stipends -- as opposed to taxes -- may be in order. Perhaps we should pay $30/ton to carbon emitters.
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JMG Posted 12:50 pm
22 Apr 2007
Just need to make sure I'm not seeing things.
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:21 pm
22 Apr 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Werdna Posted 2:55 pm
22 Apr 2007
OK, this may be a silly point to make. What I am trying to say, though, is that now it may seem that GW is not directly causing harm, but I would bet that in 10-20 years time we will be seeing a direct link and its effects will be obvious.
Andrew Eisenberg
The gateway project is wrong---http://www.liveableregion.ca/
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Werdna Posted 3:11 pm
22 Apr 2007
Take the Kyoto Protocol. As the nearby chart shows, Kyoto - even if it had been successfully adopted by all signatories (including the United States), and fully adhered to throughout the century - would have postponed warming by just five years, at a cost of $180 billion a year.
In it he makes several incorrect assumptions. First, that the Kyoto protocol is meant to be the end of action towards climate change. This is incorrect. It is meant to be a first step with other protocols coming into effect as Kyoto is finished (but...where are they?). It assumes that new technologies will not come into play to offset costs. One of the good things about Kyoto is that it doesn't prescribe how GHG should be reduced. That is left up to the individual country (and the markets). This is a strong motivator for new technology.
And then there is the horrible graph in the side bar. Perhaps someone with more time can tear that apart.
Andrew Eisenberg
The gateway project is wrong---http://www.liveableregion.ca/
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Nucbuddy Posted 5:58 pm
22 Apr 2007
A gradual strengthening through stress-training can help prevent failure in later times of sudden stress. In a larger view, climate change may not appear to be a very difficult challenge.
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JMG Posted 6:33 pm
22 Apr 2007
=
Thus it might represent healthy selective-pressure, in which case greenhouse-gas stipends -- as opposed to taxes -- may be in order. Perhaps we should pay $30/ton to carbon emitters.
=
You know what your forerunners at Auschwitz called the daily receiving and sorting process when the trains unloaded?
The selection.
So, nucbuddy, let me just be the first to say F.O.A.D., and I hope to hell that I'm not in your part of the country for when you realize that you will never escape your pimply permanent virgin status and decide to go all Columbine and VA Tech on folks to show them how weak and stupid they are compared to your brilliance.
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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Zarkov Posted 6:45 pm
22 Apr 2007
LOL, joke or what
Hotter oceans mean more water evaporation.
More water evaporation means more cloud.
More cloud means thicker cloud banks.
Thicker cloud banks mean RAINFALL.
on land and on the sea.... the clouds spiral from the tropics down to the polar regions, dropping water as they get denser and colder.
Andrew Eisenberg , global climate change is not innocuous, it will precipitate the end of civilisation.... but IMO, human beings will do this, the GCC will just hasten the process.
If human beings behave as they die of thirst, then the final effects of GCC will be fatal for all LIFE.
Take your pick.
What to do ?
Book "The Death of Clouds"
omegafour.com
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dannybee Posted 10:03 pm
22 Apr 2007
face the future, Bjorn. If there IS one!
read my blognotes here:
http://climatechange3000.blogspot.com
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:08 am
23 Apr 2007
The most pressing issue is to sequester the top 3% of society who cause 95% of the harm.
Grist is their apologist.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:11 am
23 Apr 2007
More water evaporation means more cloud.
More cloud means thicker cloud banks.
Thicker cloud banks mean RAINFALL.
on land and on the sea.... the clouds spiral from the tropics down to the polar regions, dropping water as they get denser and colder.
Check this, warmer ocean temps means more RAINFALL.
But much less actually reaching land.
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q= ...
Main reason is because the evaporated water is pushed farther skyward due to hot air currents from the warm ocean, and then rains.
So much so that it doesn't have the chance to come in low, and then get pushed skyward by mountains, then rain.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:36 am
23 Apr 2007
This irrigates land in areas like the uS southwest. The vegetation sequesters cO2 and provides huge amounts of water vapor, the rtesulting clouds reflect more sunlight.
The double effect of more reflected sunlight from clouds and CO2 absorption by plants on the irrigated land provides the necessary cooling.
Stop the presses. Branson, cough up the dough.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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jscorse Posted 2:53 am
23 Apr 2007
Proposition #1- we should care at least as much about people today as people yet to be born
Proposition #2- if things to save people in the future may take resources away from saving people today we need to consider this
That's essentially Lomborg's critique and the main critique inherent in sustainable development. I am not saying that it can't be solved, but to pretend that there isn't a tension or a tradeoff that deserves serious attention is wrong.
There are billions of people suffering right now whose lives could be markedly improved with resources right now- any system that affords them less attention and investment than people 100 years from now who don't exist yet faces moral challenges. This can be dealt with only if we face it head-on and not wish it away.
J.S.
J.S.
htt://voicesofreason.info
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JMG Posted 3:05 am
23 Apr 2007
And how does the water get from the Pacific to the "Southwest US"--telekinesis? The volumetric flow rate through osmosis systems is measured in cc/min--not terribly much faster than evaporation rates in a hot climate. So, having used wave power to propel the water through an osmosis filter, how do you then get desalinated water to move hundreds of miles, on a scale that would provide for irrigating a beach, much less an interior desert?
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:14 am
23 Apr 2007
Those who value the future more than the present.
Versus those who value the present more than the future.
_
And if you are including heavy discounting, or in Lomborgs case, a short timeframe.
Then yes, it would always be more beneficial to NOT prepare for the future.
Since in a short timeframe scenario, the future doesn't exist.
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Michael Tobis Posted 3:28 am
23 Apr 2007
I think it is Lomborg; the alternative text says "questioning Lomborg".
I'm not sure it's a useful graphic. I didn't add it, and I am thinking about deleting it, but I'm new around these parts. Opinions?
mt
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:59 am
23 Apr 2007
Absolutely, Zarkov.
Some seas (the Arctic, Indian) are falling. That's because with the weight of ice lifting, our crust can expand. We know there are underground "crevasses" large enough to hold an underground ocean:
http://www.livescience.com/environment/070228_beijing_ano ...
Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.
The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet's deep mantle.
The earth is clearly spongey and can hold vast amounts of water inside itself. With the beneficial heating coming on, the earth will be more permeable, dropping ocean levels precipitously...but to the benefit of many.
The increased clouds and rainfall can make deserts bloom, and make up for the decreased ice packs -- giving us fresh clear water everywhere.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:12 am
23 Apr 2007
According to what scientists?
The increased clouds and rainfall can make deserts bloom, and make up for the decreased ice packs -- giving us fresh clear water everywhere.
Assuming the rain happens on land, and not in the ocean.
Since hot air rises. And if it rises high enough, the pressure turns it to rain, and it never reaches the shore.
Usually rain is caused when mountains or elevated terrain raise the altitude of clouds.
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amazingdrx Posted 7:24 am
23 Apr 2007
Big ass (wind eledctric powered)pumps. Right into all those areas that use Colorado River water now. The offshore energy platforms can purify water with reverse osmosis pumping and supply electricity to pump the water all over the ag regions of California and Arizona.
Grass, trees, crops. All are fine as long as thick organic soil stores cO2 along with growing the vegetation. This water is very valuable in terms of agriculture.
The southwest is just one example, inumerable dry regions suitable for this process are available planet wide. It would be enough land area to effectively cancel global climate change from CO2. And power itself financially with corresponding economic growth.
Ag regions are dying from drought now. Revive them, save the rivers and aquifers, and reverse warming. I bet the electric power production from wind/wave offshore would be effective too.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Energy745 Posted 7:46 am
23 Apr 2007
"We don't live in an economy; that's an abstraction, a theory that is useful for some purposes and not others."
No. No. No.
We do live in an economy, and always have. A long time ago it was not as complex an economy but when a person trades with another person it is an economy. The economy is the most important factor to all human endeavors. The economy is how we feed ourselves, how we move around, allows us to communicate beyond face to face contact, and affects every activity in our lives. When the economy suffers we all suffer.
You must understand this most basic fact before you can begin to change anything. The economy is why things are so difficult to change. Its like brain surgery, it would be easy if you did not have to worry about patient health. You could simply cut out the brain slice it up and take out the part you want. If you propose to make a change to laws or to human action and you do not consider the economy you will not be successful. If you want to pass laws to protect the environment and do not consider how people will live and provide for their families then you are always going to fail.
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caniscandida Posted 8:10 am
23 Apr 2007
Obviously, getting our definitions straight is in order. But can the underlying truth of MT's words be denied?: our "life" cannot be defined and constricted by our squabbling for more or less valuable resources in a marketplace.
By the way, I am glad and relieved that that bleach-blond gimp is gone (who was really not all that good-looking), and that that photo is not a portrait of Michael Tobis, whose post I like a lot.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Zarkov Posted 8:11 am
23 Apr 2007
More water evaporation, more rain, everywhere. Obviously not happening.
There is a severe disruption to this process, the Earth's hydrology cycle is broken..
only one explanation that goes back a hundred or so years... OIL
omegafour.com
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GreyFlcn Posted 10:20 am
23 Apr 2007
(Note: I haven't read it yet, but I trust Scientific American did a good job)
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2- ...
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hibiscus Posted 2:40 pm
23 Apr 2007
i have trouble with the equation of "peace" with "free trade". trade barriers are not always a source of deprivation and war, instead offering balance to poorer countries. "economic interdependency" may be more what you're saying?
i agree with the others that "we don't live in an economy" is an exaggeration, though neither irresponsible nor damaging. there's no such thing as one person; so there's no such thing as absence of culture; so there's no such thing as absence of a system of exchange and division of work, aka, an economy. whether the cosmology and the economy are separated, that's an issue. how one visualizes the various exchanges and transformations of materials to goods and back again.
we give things meaning because that's how we model, it helps us understand how what's near us works. what's farther away, we tend over purify, thinking, i don't know, maybe of heaven.
it seems like economic measurements are hoped to be as pure a representation of human valuation as climate modeling hopes to represent relationships of biomatter and other chemistry. both systems don't/can't/aren't supposed to tell the entire story of the world because people -- all life -- estimate and innovate like lunatics to make a living, beating both the expectation to be maximally risk-seeking and maximally risk-averse.
i've been tossing the idea that the reason people are having trouble adjusting to this trouble, even given the timeframe problem, and gore's wonderful use the slow-boiled frog as a metaphor for that particular blind spot of ours -- i've been thinking that this may be the first time, in ages, that we've faced a big problem we couldn't just pick up and walk away from. there's no safe place anywhere. with the nuclear threat, we at least had a clear action to avoid, but this really feels like being cornered, doesn't it?
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:56 am
24 Apr 2007
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/regional/305.htm#figureA ...
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:26 am
24 Apr 2007
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/regional/305.htm#figureA ...
Wow, was almost going to admit you made a solid smackdown with that point.
Then I realised the bottom half of the chart was temperature, not rainfall.
It does however do a good job at showing how uncorrelated surface temperatures and precipitation levels are.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/04/19/australia.dro ...
http://greyfalcon.net/solar.png
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