Bad American

It’s completely understandable that the average news browser doesn’t quite know who or what to believe in when it comes to global climate change.

Independent (UK)

Nine ways in which the Earth could be tipped into a potentially dangerous state that could last for many centuries have been identified by scientists investigating how quickly global warming could run out of control.

A major international investigation by dozens of leading climate scientists has found that the “tipping points” for all nine scenarios – such as the melting of the Arctic sea ice or the disappearance of the Amazon rainforest – could occur within the next 100 years.

The scientists warn that climate change is likely to result in sudden and dramatic changes to some of the major geophysical elements of the Earth if global average temperatures continue to rise as a result of the predicted increase in emissions of man-made greenhouse gases.

Most and probably all of the nine scenarios are likely to be irreversible on a human timescale once they pass a certain threshold of change, and the widespread effects of the transition to the new state will be felt for generations to come, the scientists said.

“Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change. Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic [man-made] climate change,” they report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pretty much jives with what a lot of us have been hearing and reading. Now comes this:

The New York Times

Suppose that the pessimistic forecasts of global warming are accurate. Suppose that the planet’s temperature rises according to the high-end scenario of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and that we experience the economic and social impacts (like hunger, malaria and coastal flooding) projected by the much-publicized Stern Review sponsored by the British government.

Does that mean our best course of action is to quickly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases?

That’s the question addressed in a new report by Indur Goklany for the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank that has taken issue with many of the dire predictions about global warming. What’s interesting about this report is that it works from the assumption that the dire forecasts are accurate, even the Stern Review, which has been severely criticized for exaggerating the economic costs of global warming. (See, for instance, the critiques by the Yale economist William Nordhaus in the journal Science and in this article article from the Journal of Economic Literature.) Dr. Goklany accepts the Stern Review’s grim numbers and looks at the I.P.C.C.’s various scenarios, which project different levels of warming and sea-level rise depending on the the rate of economic growth, energy use and other factors.

“The surprising conclusion using the Stern Review’s own estimates,” Dr. Goklany writes, “is that future generations will be better off in the richest but warmest” of the I.P.C.C.’s scenarios. He concludes that cutting emissions will do much less good than encouraging sustainable development in poor countries and policies of “focused adaptation” to deal with disease and environmental problems like coastal flooding. For a fifth the cost of the Kyoto Protocol, he calculates, these adaptation policies could yield more immediate and also long-term benefits than would a policy that entirely halted global warming (which would cost far, far more than Kyoto). He argues that this path isn’t merely an economic but also a moral imperative:

For the foreseeable future, people will be wealthier—and their well-being higher—than is the case for present generations both in the developed and developing worlds and with or without climate change. The well-being of future inhabitants in today’s developing world would exceed that of the inhabitants of today’s developed world under all but the poorest scenario. Future generations should, moreover, have greater access to human capital and technology to address whatever problems they might face, including climate change. Hence the argument that we should shift resources from dealing with the real and urgent problems confronting present generations to solving potential problems of tomorrow’s wealthier and better positioned generations is unpersuasive at best and verging on immoral at worst.

This particular view seems to believe that if we allow the current rates of consumption and exhaustion, future generations will be able to develop the technological know-how to achieve a quick fix.

In short, the ‘technology will save us’ theory, expanded to a few generations.

Willing to take that risk? I’m not. Especially in light of the information hard science provides us from the Independent story.

Dr. Goklany, from what I’ve read, also doesn’t take into account the rise of new strains of viruses and bacterias that are coming from a newly warmed environment. There are several vectors affecting the sustainability of life of earth and I believe the balance is delicate in nature, as do many scientists. Goklany seems to see the world as durable for the sustainment of enough human potential and capital for at least a few more generations.

This is playing ‘beat the clock’ with the future of humankind. And what Western nations are going to be “encouraging sustainable development in poor countries?” Wanna bet on THAT?

And in the end, irreversible is, well, irreversible.