Red, Green & Blue: Is It Time to Just Live With Climate Change?
An article in this week’s Time magazine raises an interesting point about climate change. While there’s a growing consensus that global warming is real, the author writes, there’s also an emerging body of opinion that says it’s either too late to stop it or it’s not worth trying to stop. We’d be better off, these pundits say, investing in ways to make it easier to deal with the effects of climate change: build stronger dams, dikes and levees; do more to prevent the spread of diseases like malaria; provide more aid to help the poor live with increasingly hotter, or damper, or drier, or stormier conditions; etc.
While my initial reaction to people like Bjorn Lomborg, who has written, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming
Tags: Bjorn Lomborg, carbon emissions, climate change, Cool It, global warming, greenhouse gases, Red, Green and Blue
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October 9th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
1. You can’t protect people from it.
2. Even if you could, it’s way better not to be any (or be as little) "it" to protect them from.
3. Enough with the homo-centric arguments! What about all the other creatures we share this planet with, and the planet itself?
October 9th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Good afternoon Shirley!
I’ve not read any of Lomborg’s work before but I’ve heard him interviewed on several programs… NPR’s All Things Considered I think being one. He seems like he is on the same page as I am. We need to consider how effectively our dollars are being used. We can’t let hysteria over one necessary cause trump all the others. We need to focus on where we can affect an outcome that maximizes our investments. I personally don’t believe the Carbon trap is the proper vehicle for accomplishment.
There’s a lot we can do in the world with basic nutrition and sanitation that is 1000 times more effective than carbon reduction.
Another point he makes is that although we will see problems due to the gain in heat, there will also be benefits in reduction of deadly cold. Without factoring these in you don’t get a very balanced picture and to tout only one side of the story will ultimately make the Carbon Movement seem disingenuous.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Hello Jimmy, While I am intrigued by some of the points Lomborg raises, I agree with Time that "The Dane’s grasp of climate science seems shaky at best." (He argues, for example, that polar bears are actually thriving — all evidence to the contrary.)
I’m troubled too by his suggestion that warmer winters will save lives, offsetting the additional heat wave deaths we might expect. That’s a simplistic approach, considering warmer overall temperatures at higher altitudes and latitudes tend to give rise to more things like mosquitoes that carry malaria, as well as other vector-borne diseases. I don’t believe (unless someone has a solid analysis indicating otherwise — I haven’t seen one from Lomborg) that, overall, human deaths will decline rather than increase from ALL causes as the climate warms.
Cavalary, I do agree: humans aren’t the only ones to feel the impact of a degraded environment. I’m all for protecting the biosphere as a whole. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always seem to be the M.O. for the powers-that-be.
Here’s my biggest concern, though: by shifting our focus from preventing climate change to making it easier for people to deal with it, are we just trading one pie-in-the-sky promise for another? In theory, we could have done more till now to reduce poverty, hunger and the diseases of the developing world … but we haven’t. Why should we believe anyone who says we’d have more resolve to do so now?
It’s like the whole post-Katrina mess in Louisiana (and, no, Jimmy, I’m not saying Katrina was caused by global warming): the local scientists on the ground who watch the wetlands and levees every day knew how to prevent what happened, but the Army Corps and a mess of politicos (local, state and national) sent more money toward pet projects or pet contractors. Today, too, we know how to prevent the damage of future Katrinas (see the investigation prepared by LSU hurricane guy Ivor van Heerden and others), but no one is doing them. The Army Corps and the same gang is doing things the way they want over again, the science be damned.
So why should I believe a global approach to preparing for the impact of climate change be any different? If you don’t like New Orleans, FEMA or the Army Corps, Jimmy, I can just imagine what you’ll think about the U.N.! : )
October 10th, 2007 at 2:49 am
I have also heard Bjorn Lomborg (the global warming semi-skeptic) talk, and I agree with the author in her reply, that his knowledge is rather shaky and he is more committed to the idea that we should all calm down, than to actually understanding the facts and considering how to deal with the real situation.
The question raised in this article, and answered in a casually positive manner by Lomborg, is whether avoiding global warming (or trying to reduce its trajectory) is for the most part too expensive and not necessary.
May I pose, then, the questions provided by scientists I know who hear that kind of argument: 1) how do we know what the upper limit is to the warming? Are we willing to “adjust” to a 20 F increase in average temperatures? Or more? and 2) what about tripping points such as mini-ice-ages, what about rising oceans displacing hundreds of millions of people, and what about the overly fast shifting of weather patterns leading to vast extinctions and loss of food productivity.
All in all, I feel confident that the position of “do nothing, just adapt” is based on an only partially aware perception of the scope of these problems, in turn caused possibly by wishful thinking.
My answer to all that is: fight like heck to assist all the natural points of inflection in the economy where renewables and efficiencies are favored, build popular awareness, and bolster governmental management capabilities, and take all the steps we can to keep the earth from spinning out of control with possibly disastrous consequences for many life forms on the earth, including human beings.
October 10th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Well Shirley, you’ll always have alarmists who go all Chicken Little about the potential doomsday of not giving their pet problems exaggerated importance. And just like a stopped watch being right twice a day; sure enough there will be some calamity that pops up ever so often allowing for endless rounds of ‘I told you so!’. The problem for policy makers is that EVERYONE is chirping about their own doomsday scenarios; each with a seeming good cause; so which little birdie do you feed? The answer is that you give them each the first 20% of what they say they need and expect them to invest it wisely in a way where we derive 80% of the goal. Then when the ‘I told you so’ chants start to rise in the face of an act of God you just suck it up knowing that you covered all your other bases. Hopefully reason will ultimately prevail.
David, I guess my problem is the huge focus on CO2. We shortly will hit a saturation point where no matter how much more CO2 we add it will make no difference to the global temperature. Also historically just looking at the hockey stick CO2 would seem to be a trailing trend not a leading cause. Why the huge focus on the one thing that our capital economy cannot easily remedy? It is obvious that Kyoto was not an environmental treaty but instead an economic wealth redistribution treaty targeting the US. I think it’s best to focus on simple common sense changes that help minimize our impact on the environment rather than subjugate all of our resources to this one now-popular cause.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
A few things, Jimmy:
First, the infamous hockey stick is not the only temperature reconstruction showing a warming climate — it’s just the one that’s gotten the most attention. Dozens of other historical reconstructions have shown the same thing: the global climate is definitely warming. (See Grist’s response to this argument.)
Second, in regards to feeding those birdies. Wouldn’t you agree, Jimmy, that sometimes it’s wiser to invest upfront than to face a greater cost down the road — as, for example, when you pay for a doctor’s visit when you’re not feeling so hot rather than waiting until you collapse on the way to work with a serious case of walking pneumonia that lands you in the hospital for two weeks and costs you a regular paycheck for even longer?
That, in a nutshell, is what Nicholas Stern found to be the case when he released his economic analysis of climate change last year. He concluded the cost of proceeding with business-as-usual far outweighed the cost of responding to global warming now. He warned the effects of a business-as-usual approach could end up reducing global GDP by 20 percent and possibly cause a global recession. AND, he was using climate figures that, even just one year later, appear to be on the optimistic side.
Consider the news from just this week: Tim Flannery (author of "The Weather Makers") said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report due out this November will show that greenhouse gases had reached about 455 parts per million (in carbon dioxide equivalent) by the middle of 2005. That’s a level most scientists didn’t expect to see for another 10 years.
All of these things tend to make me agree a lot more with David Alexander’s comments above: The do-nothing, just-adapt approach "is based on an only partially aware perception of the scope of these problems, in turn caused possibly by wishful thinking."
October 10th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
If you live in a world without scarce resources Shirley then I guess it’s OK to invest the maximum in everything. Funding is the problem though. Taxes are not unlimited. If you tax consumption people will consume less and economic activity will diminish. If you tax incomes then it discourages the work reward cycle and economic activity will diminish. Our ability to deal with the various problems we face depends on a balanced approach to funding the research and solutions.
Pardon me if I’m a bit skeptical about government reports that find the solution to a problem is more government. I have yet to see such a report that does not advocate more government intervention regardless of the issue.
October 10th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Well, Jimmy, there’s the flip side that says if you don’t take action to solve problems that will harm people’s lives and livelihoods, they won’t have a lot of money to spend then either, and the economy suffers as well.
Again, look at New Orleans: if the brain trusts in charge had only spent the money appropriately for wetlands preservation and proper levees in the first place, the city would have never been 80-percent under water and now struggling to come anywhere close to past revenue earnings, tourist dollars, etc. I guarantee any analysis will show that a wise investment in levees and wetlands 10, 20, 30 years ago would have been a tiny fraction of the actual costs caused by the levee collapses.
October 10th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
I’ve been doing this all along. Let them seed the seas with iron or whatever the scientists think will work.
October 10th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
again, not many people have a basic understand of geological history, or of moderating behavior. global warming is a cumulative result of many factors, some of which are human-based and some of which are beyond our control. we can and should adjust our behaviors to minimize the damaging effects our lives have on the earth, but also come to terms with the fact that its not just us, by any means, and that the earth naturally goes through climactic instability, in fact that’s all it ever does. we can have ice ages interspersed with normal climate, or normal climate interspersed with heat waves. all depends how you look at it, what lifeforms prefer what temperatures. by minimizing our contribution to climate instability we can also add resources to our ability to adapt to an evolving climate.
of course, that will never happen.