Is It Rational To Celebrate the Positive Short-term Effects of Global Warming?
As we all know, there are a few beneficial effects of global warming – at least in the short-term. Apparently, the governor of Maine saw fit to point out that the melting ice is opening up the Arctic for shipping, and this will be good for his state. According to the Bangor Daily News, Paul LePage (R) told an audience at a transportation conference Thursday morning, “Everybody looks at the negative effects of global warming, but with the ice melting, the Northern Passage has opened up.”
Maybe I’m being unfair here, but, since the bad effects so dramatically outweigh the good on a planetary scale (sea-level rise, climate refugees, desertification, scarcity of water and food, etc.), the governor seems a bit silly making a statement like this. The skyrocketing rate of childhood cancer is good for the pediatric oncology industry, but one would have to be quite warped to suggest that we should be looking at the good side of disease.
The boiled frog probably thought the slowly warming water was a nice relaxing swim, too.
Alcoholism’s wonderful, for the owner of a liquor store; divorce is really great for lawyers.
There will always be those who will callously profit from misery and even work to grow it.
In a “primitive” tribal village, none of that would – ever, for an instant – pass the smell test.
How can republicans be so blind and irrational ?? Does he not think about the future generations ??
And what else; opening of that Passage will eventually submerge all of Maine’s port cities !!
Craig,
Not only is it rational to analyze both good and bad impacts of any change, it’s irrational not to.. If you only looked for the potential negatives of any change, then you would never support any change – and you’d become the same kind of obstructionist nonsense engine that the republican party has distorted itself into.
The fact that there will be people who will benefit from global warming is self-evident. The fact that many more people will suffer is extremely likely. What’s left becomes an exercise in game theory: Trying to organize the minimum necessary incentives for those who would gain from AGW to support efforts to mitigate warming at their own expense, while trying to incentive maximum emission mitigation with minimal economic disruption.
This is what it would take to really accomplish something. By attempting to just ignore or deny the prospective gains you are literally doing the exact same thing that the anti-science denialists are doing when they try to deny or ignore the prospective harm.
So you weren’t taken with by analogy of pediatric oncology?
Craig,
With all due respect, the analogy you offered was sophistry.
There will be major gains in the high latitudes, from increased trade and travel to dramatically lowered climate control to increased agricultural growth and development… and there will be tremendous damage in the equatorial and tropical regions, as well as some deep inland continental interiors. These are facts that we know. But the difference will by no means be similar to cancer vs doctor’s paycheck. There won’t be EXTREME, SHARP, and FATAL damage to a select group of people resulting in an even smaller number of people benefitting slightly.
It’s more akin to one group of farmers benefiting from a high commodity price due to a widespread drought in another region (which coincidentally will become more common as AGW gradually builds). The farmers who benefit will be a noticeably large group, and their benefit would be substantial… The farmers who are hit by drought will either be devastated or merely financially burdened – depending on whether you imagine them to have crop insurance (subsidized support from a strong government), and everyone else will have a much smaller burden of higher food costs (or, in the case of AGW – more storm damage, higher water costs, more infrastructure costs, etc…)
In the analogy of the farming, the net damage to society is measured in the crop insurance payments… Everything else is just a transfer of wealth from the commons to the successful farmers who were in the right region.
The question we have to ask is: what will the tally of that farm insurance be?
I think prospective prices falling between $10 and $30/ton of emitted CO2e are within reason, between $5 and $40/ton-CO2e are defensible… and beyond that is probably partisan hackmanship. I’m willing to be persuaded, but these are broad ranges that I’ve come up with based on the models and the economic projections that I’ve seen.
(In the case of the farmers that have no insurance – such as onrushing disasters like Bangladesh – your cancer analogy is more fitting… but the majority of human experience over the next 100 years will probably involve centralized support)
I’d feel a whole lot better if I had any suspicion that the governor had engaged in anything remotely resembling a holistic accounting of the (few minor) positive and (MANY severe ) negative impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption.
There are a great many unknowns with regard to our continuing disruption of the climate, but damages from extreme and unpredictable weather will go far beyond merely interfering with and destroying our technological, architectural and infrastructure constructs and disturbing our crop cycles.
Consider the potential effects of that predictably amplifying disruption (with the methane flood from the presently occurring permafrost thaw)… perhaps most notably, the rising acidity (and temperature) of our oceans and the impacts of that on coral and phytoplankton, combined with the acute overfishing and the gargantuan quantities of pollution we’ve for many decades inflicted upon the seas (collectively our main source of global oxygen), and the resulting die-offs and dead zones we’ve increasingly seen there.
Envision all that acting in a most regrettable synergy with the stripping of wide areas of ancient forest (both arboreal and tropical) that once performed as sinks and filters for freshwater. I could go on, but, the point is, we’ve too long ignored and neglected the consequences of the un-carefully guided direction of our collective behavior, and the trends are now rapidly overtaking us.
I’m again reminded of an economist who stated that the very worst impacts of climate disruption would not have much effect on the economy as a whole, because agriculture makes up only about 3% of the economy. He seems to have neglected to consider it’s the 3% we eat. Jeremy Grantham’s work is instructive here. I have a very strong feeling the positives will be negligible set beside the negatives.