by Will Boisvert
How bad will climate change be? Not very.
No, this isn’t a denialist screed. Human greenhouse emissions will warm the planet, raise the seas and derange the weather, and the resulting heat, flood and drought will be cataclysmic.
Cataclysmic—but not apocalyptic. While the climate upheaval will be large, the consequences for human well-being will be small. Looked at in the broader context of economic development, climate change will barely slow our progress in the effort to raise living standards.
To see why, consider a 2016 Newsweek headline that announced “Climate change could cause half a million deaths in 2050 due to reduced food availability.” The story described a Lancet study, “Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change,” [1] that made dire forecasts: by 2050 the effects of climate change on agriculture will shrink the amount of food people eat, especially fruits and vegetables, enough to cause 529,000 deaths each year from malnutrition and related diseases. The report added grim specifics to the familiar picture of a world made hot, hungry, and barren by the coming greenhouse apocalypse.
But buried beneath the gloomy headlines was a curious detail: the study also predicts that in 2050 the world will be better fed than ever before. The “reduced food availability” is only relative to a 2050 baseline when food will be more abundant than now thanks to advances in agricultural productivity that will dwarf the effects of climate change. Those advances on their own will raise per-capita food availability to 3,107 kilocalories per day; climate change could shave that to 3,008 kilocalories, but that’s still substantially higher than the benchmarked 2010 level of 2,817 kilocalories—and for a much larger global population. Per-capita fruit and vegetable consumption, the study estimated, will rise by 6.1 percent and meat consumption by 5.4 percent. The poorest countries will benefit most, with food availability rising 14 percent in Africa and Southeast Asia. Even after subtracting the 529,000 lives theoretically lost to climate change, the study estimates that improved diets will save a net 1,348,000 lives per year in 2050.
A headline like “Despite climate change, rising food production will save millions of lives” isn’t great click-bait, but it would give a truer picture of a future under global warming as envisioned in the Lancet study. That picture is typical of the scientific literature on the impacts of climate change on human welfare. Global warming won’t wipe us out or even stall our progress, it will just marginally slow ordinary economic development that will still outpace the negative effects of warming and make life steadily better in the future, under every climate scenario. What the doomsday prognostications of drought and flood, heat-stroke and famine, migration and war miss is that climate change is not the only thing going on in the world, or even the most important thing.
It’s not even a new thing. Throughout history humans not only weathered climate crises but deliberately flung ourselves into them as we migrated away from our African homeland into deserts, mountains, floodplains and taiga. Global warming pales beside the climatic challenge surmounted by the Inuit when they settled the Arctic with igloos and kayaks, revolutionary technologies that improved their ability to travel and hunt. Theirs is just one example of the human capacity for finding better ways to get food, shelter, energy and resources from the hostile environments we embrace. “Adaptation” is not quite the right word for that process, which is so ubiquitous—and so fundamental to progress—that it is the essence of development.
This latest episode in humanity’s ongoing conquest of extreme climates will likewise amount to just another problem in economic and technological development, and a middling-scale one at that. Although clean energy will play a significant role by slowing and perhaps moderating global warming (as well as reducing pollution and easing resource constraints), contrary to the decarbonize-or-die doomsayers our main response to climate change will be other kinds of development that make climate change irrelevant. We will grow more food, harness more water, cool ourselves more vigorously, move to new lands and build—and-rebuild—new cities. We will exploit technological breakthroughs, but mostly we will improve familiar technologies and deploy them more widely. We will do all this not because of global warming but because of more pressing challenges like population growth and the demand for higher living standards. The means by which we will overcome specific problems posed by climate change look less like the pristine “sustainable development” envisioned by greens and more like the ordinary development that has always sustained us.
The conquest of drought
Environmentalists cite the 2006-10 drought in Syria, often credited with sparking the civil war there, as an omen of the crises climate change will bring. [2] But the drought also hit Israel, and the effect there was altogether different. Shortages forced Israel to tighten its already stringent water conservation and recycling standards. More importantly, they prompted breakthroughs in reverse-osmosis desalination technology, cutting by half the energy needed to extract fresh water from the sea and dramatically lowering the cost to just 58 cents per cubic meter (1,000 liters) of drinkable water. [3] As a result, Israel’s water situation U-turned from worsening scarcity to sufficiency. The arid country now desalinates 600 million cubic meters of water annually, easing the pressure on natural freshwater sources like the Sea of Galilee. More desal plants are being built. By 2020 Israel will get at least 40 percent of its water, including irrigation water, from desalination. [4]
The implications of cheap desalination are profound. By tapping limitless sea-water resources it could drought-proof agriculture and thus eliminate the greatest threat posed by climate change. The recent mega-drought in California prompted much climate alarmism, but at the low prices achieved in Israel the state could generate its entire annual water consumption of 40 million acre-feet from desal plants for $30 billion a year, just 1.2 percent of the state’s GDP. [5] It won’t come to that: freshwater sources will never completely dry up and desal at $715 per acre-foot would still be several times more expensive than natural water in California (though not during droughts, when auction prices for irrigation water can spike as high as $2,200 per acre-foot). [6] Still, if Californians had to rely on desal they could do it without breaking a sweat. Contrary to the Blade Runner franchise, Californians in 2049 will live off of well-watered produce fields, not desiccated grub farms.
The world’s driest regions will increasingly rely on desalinated water for drinking and farming, but less splashy technologies will dominate water supply. Efficiency measures like drip irrigation (invented in Israel) and recycling (86 percent of the water Israeli households use gets recycled for irrigation) [7] will stretch existing water sources much further. Efficiency has already let the developed world turn the corner on water consumption: America’s total water withdrawals in 2015 were 13 percent below the 1980 peak, for a much larger population and economy. [8]
Simply moving water where it’s needed will continue as the mainstay of water management. Here California is the leader. The California Aqueduct, running 400 miles up and down mountain ranges to take water from the wetter north to the drier south, is just part of a colossal irrigation system that has made the state’s arid landscape an agricultural powerhouse. Since ancient Sumeria’s hey-day water infrastructure has been humanity’s most important development strategy and climate technology; we will continue to expand it, on continental scales, to even out erratic rainfall and conjure fertile fields from bone-dry weather.
The examples of Israel and California show that developed countries will never face serious water shortages in a warming climate. Spreading water security to the rest of the world will thus depend not on decarbonization but on development of a very basic kind: dams, canals and pipelines; sewage treatment and recycling plants; low-flow shower heads and irrigation sprinklers; a backstop of desalination plants. Investments in these technologies and infrastructures, new and old, will resolve problems of drought and aridity that have bedeviled us since civilization began—and eliminate the worst risk of climate change in passing.
The conquest of hunger
Steadily improving water supplies will shore up our food supply, but other advances—from genetically modified seeds to innovative tilling to better storage facilities—will have a huge impact too, ensuring that farm productivity soars on a warmer planet.
Warming by itself will likely have only modest effects on farm productivity, according to projections from the International Panel on Climate Change. [9] The IPCC assessed changes in the yields of the major grain crops under warming of up to 5 degrees Celsius—a worst-case scenario, far beyond the 2-degree threshold of doom cited by policy-makers—and the results are decidedly un-alarming. In temperate regions climate change would cause yields of corn and wheat to decline by about 10 percent and rice yields by 15 percent. However, all these declines could be reversed by adaptations like earlier planting dates: with adaptation temperate-zone corn and rice yields would not decline at all and wheat yields would rise 9 percent. Tropical areas could see corn yields decline about 15 percent and rice yields 7 percent, but with adaptation tropical rice yields would instead rise 12 percent. Tropical-zone wheat yields would suffer a serious decline of over 30 percent even with adaptation, but farmers don’t grow much wheat in the tropics so the effect on global supply would be small.
These limited and mostly reversible effects of climate change barely register beside the real challenge facing agriculture—the steeply rising demand for food. By 2050 an extra 2 billion mouths to feed and meat-heavier diets will make global food consumption swell by 50 to 100 percent over the 2006 level. [10] Compared to population growth, richer diets and the imperative to reduce hunger in impoverished nations, global warming will be a minor burden; decarbonizing the energy supply would thus do little to reduce the stress on food supplies. Some decarbonization measures, like the diversion of food crops to produce low-carbon biofuels, will actually worsen the food crisis. One study estimates that by 2050 biofuel production will consume up to 363 million tons of crops, the equivalent of 14 percent of 2017’s global cereal-grain harvest. [11] If we simply drop biofuels from clean-energy policy, that alone would erase most of the projected food deficit caused by climate change.
Meanwhile, countervailing developments that increase yields will outrun the effects of climate change and dramatically raise farm output. They’re already working; in the past ten years the global grain harvest grew 23 percent, half again as much as the 15 percent growth in population. [12] Productivity will keep rising. A recent report from the International Food Policy Research Institute spotlighted a range of innovations that will boost yields: better weed treatments can raise corn, rice and wheat yields by 6 to 12 percent; heat-tolerant crop varieties can raise corn yields by 31 to 37 percent and wheat yields by 16 to 28 percent; no-till cultivation can raise corn yields 20 to 67 percent and wheat yields 19 to 57 percent. [13] Advanced technologies like genetically engineered seeds will play a role, but basic inputs will be more important: a recent study in Nature estimated that simply using more irrigation and fertilizer could raise yields 45 to 70 percent. [14]
Developing countries will see the greatest productivity gains—Africa could more than double its grain harvest by bringing yields up to the current global average [15]—but Western agribusiness will continue to improve as well. Comparing three-year averages in the U. S. in 2014-2016 with the 2004-2006 period, corn yields grew 12 percent over the decade, wheat yields 13 percent and soybean yields 15 percent. [16] There’s still plenty of room for improvement by adopting best practices: winners of the 2016 National Wheat Yield Contest beat their counties’ average yields by anywhere from 37 to 377 percent. [17] Farmers will also expand production by cultivating new land in vast northern regions where warming will improve the climate. In Canada rising temperatures could boost corn yields 60 percent and wheat yields 70 percent. [18]
We will also get more food by not wasting it. The world currently wastes about one third of the food it produces. [19] In developed countries much of it is rejected by finicky retailers and shoppers or left to molder in the fridge, but in poor countries it is mostly lost in pre-marketing stages—rotting in fields or spoiling after harvest before it reaches market. Africa could recover about 11 percent of its food supply by reducing losses in production, storage and distribution to European levels. The technology is banal: machinery that can harvest fields quickly when destructive weather threatens; plastic bags and metal silos to keep insects out of grain; roads and trucks to take produce quickly to market, plastic crates to keep it from getting crushed en route, refrigerated warehouses to keep it fresh and canneries to preserve it. [20]
Global warming won’t crimp the world’s food supply much and decarbonization won’t safeguard it. Preserving and expanding the food supply to meet rising demand will rely on hum-drum investment in growing and processing food—doing what we do now, only more and better. Unfortunately, misplaced environmental priorities may undermine that program by demonizing important technologies like GMOs and championing organic farming and other low-input, low-yield models as replacements for industrial agriculture. To feed the world we will have to question that vision of sustainability.
The conquest of heat
The most lurid climate change scenario is the wet-bulb apocalypse: the combination of rising temperatures with humidity so saturating that sweat cannot evaporate from the skin to cool the body. In a recent climate jeremiad in New York Magazine David Wallace-Wells claims that global warming will make such steam-bath weather so commonplace that outdoor work would become impossible in many places. Eventually, he warns, “more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat.” [21]
But contrary to Wallace-Wells’s panic, extreme heat is becoming quite livable thanks to another banal technology: air conditioning. Just as people in the past used fire and clothing to settle in lethally cold climates, today we are using cheap cooling technology to expand into lethally hot climates with no harm to our health. Thanks to air conditioning the Florida-to-Nevada swelter-belt has seen a population boom—disproportionately of heat-vulnerable retirees—at the same time as annual heat-related deaths in the U. S. have plunged 80 percent. [22] Mechanical cooling made the furnace-city of Dubai, where average high temperatures top 100 degrees Fahrenheit six months a year, into an international business hub as its population exploded from 40,000 to 2.5 million. [23]
Mass cooling is gathering steam in developing countries, where air conditioners are now one of the first electric appliances people buy. Urban Chinese have installed 200 million room air conditioners in the last 15 years, and there is now one air conditioner for every Chinese home. [24] A recent study estimated that the world will install another 700 million new AC units by 2030, and a further 900 million between 2030 and 2050. [25] Soon the world will consider an air-conditioned home to be as rudimentary an aspect of human comfort as a warm hearth on a cold night.
In time the cooling bubble will become portable enough for heavy outdoor labor. American farmers already work their fields in the comfort of air-conditioned combine cabs; less mechanized farms could set up battery-powered tents with AC and cold water to cool over-heated laborers. Qatar is experimenting with solar-powered hats that waft cool air over construction workers. [26] The ultimate response to unhealthy working temperatures may be to automate outdoor work. Farm robots can already pick apples and strawberries, thin lettuce seedlings, milk cows and grow barley from plowing through harvest. [27] The idea that we have to moderate the climate to make manual field labor more bearable gets development priorities backwards; the worse failure will be if, a hundred years from now, humans still do that back-breaking work.
For billions of people life is already too hot, so the artificial cooling of humanity will proceed regardless of climate change or decarbonization goals. A key part of that will be supplying electricity to run (and build) air conditioners; India’s soaring AC demand will necessitate some 300 new power plants over the next two decades. [28] Here too there’s a tension between necessary development and green sustainability doctrine, with its emphasis on reducing energy use and relying on intermittent wind and solar generators. Cooling requires a lot of electricity that is reliably available when demand is greatest; given the limitations of wind and solar, much of that electricity will have to come from new nuclear and, for now, fossil-fueled plants. High-quality power will take precedence over intermittent energy austerity as a strategy for beating the heat.
Rising seas
Sea-level rise is the most unsettling aspect of global warming. Major coastal areas and many large cities will be inundated; some of that is already baked into current carbon dioxide levels, with the only question being how many centuries it will take. The prospect threatens the loss of homes, of unique urban and regional cultures, and of our sense of the permanence and meaning of our world.
But as apocalyptic as it seems, sea-rise poses little risk to human well-being. The destruction will be real, and wrenching, but not overwhelming or even unusual. It will necessitate abandonment and migration and rebuilding—but such upheavals are so deeply woven into modern life, on such a grand scale, that the increment caused by climate change will hardly break our stride.
As with agriculture, climate change ranks far down the list of challenges to our built environment, infrastructure and living space. Serious problems will emerge towards the end of this century, when waters could rise up to 2 meters [29] and require major investments in sea-walls and flood-control infrastructure. More flooding will ensue, with estimates putting the number of people who could ultimately be displaced at anywhere from 72 million to 750 million over several centuries. [30] By any measure, involuntary migration of hundreds of millions of people to higher ground ranks as a cataclysm. But it’s nowhere near as cataclysmic as ordinary population growth, which will force the world to find room, homes and infrastructure for an extra two billion people by 2050.
To see what that much larger non-climatic upheaval will be like over the next 33 years we need only look at the last 33 years, during which the world gained almost three billion extra inhabitants. Those decades were a time not only of colossal population growth but of epic migrations, primarily internal migrations that often go unremarked. In China, 170 million peasants left their villages and moved dozens to hundreds of miles into cities after 1979, [31] while in India there are currently 450 million internal migrants. [32] The tidal wave of population growth and migration necessitated a frenzy of city-building. China’s Shenzhen takes the prize for growth, with its population exploding from 30,000 in 1979 to over 10 million today. Comparable growth took place in megacities the world over, from the Indian technology hub of Bangalore, which added over five million people after 1981, to metropolitan Phoenix, where migrant-driven urbanization tripled the population to 4.6 million. [33] Yet despite the strain of new people and vast relocations, far exceeding anything that climate change will cause, the period since 1980 has been a golden age of development that lifted billions of people out of deep poverty.
Break-neck construction to keep up with giant dislocations isn’t a rupture with modern life but the essence of modern life, and modernity has navigated far more extreme episodes than climate change promises. Germany and Japan emerged from World War II destitute and with their cities destroyed, but within a few decades they had rebuilt themselves from the ground up better than before. Slowly rising seas won’t pose anything like a comparable task of reconstruction.
And while the sheer waste of abandoning the wealth and labor embodied in coastal cities feels appalling, it seems less so when we reflect on just how new, provisional and even disposable our material civilization really is. In 1820 New York held just 152,000 people crammed into a tiny footprint. [34] Almost everything in the city of 8 million—tenements, skyscrapers, bridges, subways, docks, airports, the Bronx—was built in 200 years, and much of it demolished and rebuilt several times over in search of higher rents. The task of constructing a New New York somewhere inland over the next 200 years as the old one drowns seems gargantuan, but that was exactly the project the city embarked on in 1820 under horse-power and candle-light.
Rebuilding is an aspect of economic development that humans do quite well. We built the whole world in the last two centuries—much of it in the last two generations—and rebuilding a waterlogged fraction of it over the next two centuries, with the help of incomparably better technology, will hardly tax us.
Rising economies
The most inexorable feature of climate-change modeling isn’t the advance of the sea but the steady economic growth that will make life better despite global warming.
The consensus of economic forecasts in IPCC reports and elsewhere is that climate change will make only modest inroads into growth rates, [35] leaving plenty of growth to accommodate development, new infrastructure (including adaptations to climate change) and rising standards of living. [36] One study estimates that by 2100 the world will be spending up to $71 billion a year on sea walls to protect coastal areas—a huge sum, but only a drop in the bucket compared to a global GDP estimated to grow to at least $355 trillion by then. [37] Economic models of global warming are virtually unanimous in predicting at least a doubling of global per-capita GDP by 2100. [38]
The main threat to economies won’t be global warming, but the age-old problems of bad economic policy and bad governance. Venezuela’s collapse, complete with spiraling hunger and violence, outdoes anything we can expect from climate change. Climate crises are symptoms, not causes, of failed states. Blaming the turmoil in Syria on warming-induced drought gets the equation backwards: it’s the country’s deranged political culture, corrupt and authoritarian government, and persistent underdevelopment that turned drought into a precipitating factor for civil war. Because Israel is a liberal democracy with an accountable government focused on development, it responded to the same drought with transformative technology. Political reform is perhaps the most important development initiative of all.
The conquest of carbon?
The effects of climate change on human welfare will be modest in comparison to other economic and social challenges, and they will be more than compensated by ongoing development in water management, agriculture, cooling and infrastructure. Green doctrine and sustainability policy, however, have fixated on just one aspect of development: renewable energy.
That focus has brought positive results in the form of falling prices and accelerating deployment of wind and solar power, which are beginning to slow the growth of fossil-fueled electricity. If that trend strengthens it could mitigate warming and help moderate worst-case scenarios, as well as abating air pollution from fossil fuels. Economic modeling generally shows that investments in low-carbon energy are cost-effective in the long run.
Unfortunately, renewables are still growing too slowly to have much effect on greenhouse emissions. The portion of global electricity generated from low-carbon sources, nuclear and renewable, fell from 35.2 percent in 2000 to 33.5 percent in 2015. That relative decline has reversed itself in recent years, with the low-carbon fraction growing slightly to 34.2 percent in 2016; [39] but that progress is still far too slow to meet decarbonization deadlines. Worse, comprehensive decarbonization with the favored technologies of wind and solar will likely prove impossible; fossil fuels will remain necessary on a large scale to balance their surge-and-slump intermittent power. Even if renewables could somehow supply all our electricity, major greenhouse emissions from manufacturing and agriculture would persist.
The sluggish pace of decarbonization will drag on for the foreseeable future. Difficulties in integrating chaotic wind and solar generators have already slowed deployments in some countries. Renewable-energy supports have been cut back in recent years, not only in the United States but in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Australia. A Nature editorial on the Paris Agreement noted that “no major advanced industrialized country is on track to meet its pledges” to control greenhouse emissions. [40] Political pressure for more vigorous decarbonization will stay weak. The much-celebrated boom in renewable capacity also breeds complacency by suggesting to the public that the greenhouse problem is being solved even though it isn’t. Until rising seas become noticeable late in the century, global warming will present few tangible harms that could galvanize climate politics.
In the green movement itself the push for clean energy has been hobbled by the self-contradictory politics of fear that drive it. Global-warming activists have captured the public imagination with their warnings of an existential threat to the planet. Unfortunately, the same catastrophist mindset has anathematized technologies that would ease decarbonization. Anti-fracking movements would make gas-fired electricity, indispensable for balancing wind and solar, scarcer and more expensive than it needs to be. The green jihad against nuclear power, a safe and generally cheap source of reliable low-carbon energy, is especially counterproductive. Greens, motivated by outlandish exaggerations of the risk of nuclear accidents, have forced governments in Germany, Japan and elsewhere to shut down emissions-free reactors while leaving coal-fired plants in service. The apocalyptic tone that now dominates environmental discourse on every issue not only overstates the threat of warming, it gives us incoherent climate and energy policies that make warming worse.
Behind the feckless performance of clean-energy policy lies a simple reality: low-carbon power is just not critical to our well-being. Worse, pursuing it sometimes conflicts with our demand for reliable energy to run air conditioners, tractors, fertilizer plants, water pumps, steel mills, factories and construction sites. Because they address pressing needs and aren’t subject to the collective action problems that plague global climate policy, these kinds of development will take precedence over clean energy. Greens often decry these priorities as short-sighted, but in fact they address the concrete risks of hunger, heat and dislocation that climate change poses more directly than the slow, politically muddled strategy of decarbonization.
The conquest of fear
We have come to think of climate change as the canonical “extinction-level event,” a catastrophe so multifaceted and all-encompassing that it puts human survival in doubt. But when we think harder about the specific problems global warming poses—problems of water management, agricultural productivity, cooling and construction—the threat becomes less daunting. Our logistic and technical capacities are burgeoning, and they give us ample means of addressing these problems.
Moreover, the scope of warming issues, even under worst-case scenarios, is modest compared to the task of feeding and housing several billion extra people over the next few decades and accommodating the higher living standards that impoverished countries demand. That “development crisis” dwarfs the climate crisis, yet we don’t think of it as a crisis because we are steadily (though too slowly) resolving it and will continue to do so in the future. Along the way, we will resolve the climate crisis, which is fundamentally the same thing as the development crisis. Pre-modern Europe endured many climate crises—famines caused by inclement weather lasting a season or a century—that subsided with modern development; our contemporary warming issues are also symptoms of lingering underdevelopment. The faster we develop, the faster we resolve the climate crisis by decoupling our well-being from the weather.
Global warming will have serious consequences that need to be reckoned with. Cleaning up the energy supply is an important—and accelerating—aspect of development that should be nurtured, but it must be balanced against more pressing needs that sometimes conflict with it. To get the balance right greens need to give up their anxiety over development and over technologies like nuclear power that can make development both faster and cleaner. Like the man said, freedom from fear is the greatest liberation of all.
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Will,
A very nice article, summing up the whole issue.
Just a small comment on the issue of attributing the Syrian war to climate change: whomever knows this region a bit (I come from nearby Lebanon), will tell you this is complete nonsense. Who invented it is a simple ignorant, and climate change zealot. Political and religious tensions are the root cause of it, not droughts. The mass murderers ho were or still are governing the different countries over there are the root cause, not climate change.
Regards
if you finish the article, you’ll see that that’s exactly the point they make – final paragraph of “Rising Economies”
I think ghassan‘s point is valid. The pertinent place to note the primary false premise of the claimed linkage between Syria’s political decline and climate change was in the first paragraph in which the issue was cited. While noting the contradictory evidence, in a somewhat controlled-conditions experiment, between Israel and Syria (or any of the other surrounding countries), is interesting and salient to the thesis here, it is also reasonable to point out that it is misleading to present it as if it is the primary underlying false premise.
Will Boisvert ==> Absolutely Marvelously Done!
Human greenhouse emissions are not raising the seas, at least not significantly.
http://sealevel.info/120-022_Wismar_and_1612340_Honolulu_vs_CO2_annot1.png
Since the last seventy years of heavy GHG emissions, and the arguably-consequent warming, haven’t caused any detectable increase in the rate of sea-level rise, there’s no good reason to suppose that the next seventy years of GHG emissions will cause a major increase in the rate of sea-level rise, either.
Dave,
You statement that there’s no good indication that SLR will increase in the next 70 years is baseless. There are plenty of indications if you know where to look and I suspect you’re not looking.
Here’s a great presentation to watch to lay it out for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAPPq43iRLs
15,000 years an event called Meltwater Pulse 1A took place and SLR increased 50-80 feet in 400 years. That’s a rate 10 times faster than the current rate of SLR. Maybe you mull over the precedent and figure out how you summarily dismiss the possibility of recurrence before you conclude something similar isn’t about to happen again.
So in other words, SLR is a natural, cyclic occurence unconnected with GHG emmissions…
Rich,
That “precedent” is inapplicable. The water which fed Meltwater Pulse 1A didn’t materialize out of thin air. It occurred during the fastest retreat of the great Laurentide, Fennoscandian & Cordilleran ice sheets. Those ice sheets are gone, so they can’t melt now. Predictions by climate alarmists of comparable sea-level rise in the 21st century are contra-scientific.
The observational fact is that 2/3 century of very heavy CO2 emissions and steadily rising CO2 levels have caused no detectable acceleration in the rate or sea-level rise.
http://sealevel.info/120-022_Wismar_and_1612340_Honolulu_vs_CO2_annot1.png
We’ve done the experiment, and we’ve seen the result. The last ~2/3 century of increasing CO2 levels and emissions have caused no increase at all in the rate of sea level rise. It is irrational and unscientific to expect that repeating that experiment over the next 2/3 century will have a significantly different result.
Where do you think meltwater on the scale of Meltwater Pulse 1A could come from?
Not Antarctica: It averages more than 40° below zero, so a few degrees of warming obviously won’t melt it. Antarctic ice accumulation & loss are in almost perfect balance. Some studies show it is gaining ice, some show it is losing ice, but all show that the net rate, whether positive or negative, is so tiny that it could cause less than 3 inches of sea-level change per century.
Greenland is losing ice mass, most years, but not much. The best estimates are that it averages around 50 ±25 cubic miles per year, which could contribute at most about 3.1 inches of sea-level rise per century.
That’s nothing new. Greenland has been losing a little bit of ice for a very long time, and human emissions of GHGs are not the cause.
Whats more, we know that during the MWP Greenland was significantly warmer than it is now, without causing any notable sea-level increase elsewhere in the world. We know that because the Vikings were able to grow barley there, and it is too cold to grow barley there now, even with modern, quick-maturing cultivars.
https://ancientfoods.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/viking-barley-in-greenland/
We know that a warming climate causes processes which both increase and decrease sea-level rise. Based on the sea-level measurement record, it seems that when there’s no Laurentide ice sheet those processes roughly balance each other.
Sea-level is rising no faster now than it was >85 years ago, when CO2 was under 310 ppmv, and CH4 was 1.0 ppmv. A 30% increase in CO2 and an 80% increase in CH4 have caused no acceleration at all in the rate of sea-level rise, and there’s no reason to suppose that similar future increases will cause dissimilar results.
Thanks, Rich, for the link to that Eric Rignot presentation on the Climate State youtube channel.
Unfortunately, he made some mistakes. I posted a comment about those mistakes, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAPPq43iRLs&lc=UgwoHMIsrIAk3zYoFY14AaABAg
Unfortunately, you can’t read my comment, because it is “ghosted” — meaning that it is invisible to everyone except me. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that “Climate State” censors youtube comments on their videos to prevent criticism. They did it to me in the past, on another video, but I had forgotten about it.
That’s a frequent problem with climate alarmist channels and blogs. Many — perhaps most — of them are censored to prevent dissent. So the errors go uncorrected, and unsuspected readers and viewers continue to be misled. That’s a common practice used by “climate communicators” for climate alarmism messaging.
Hi Dave,
Your comments seem well-informed, but you fall into the same trap as your most vociferous opponents — you overstate your side.
You write, “The only important impacts of higher CO2 levels, thus far, are very positive. All the significant “negative effects” are hypothetical, but the > +15% increase in agricultural productivity, and the dramatic greening of the the Earth, are real, and well-measured.”
This is argumentation, not reasoned analysis. It is like arguing that you should buy a new car instead of paying for fire insurance because the new car brings myriad benefits, whereas your house burning down is only “hypothetical.” The worst effects of climate change are only “hypothetical” because they haven’t happened yet. Once they do, it will be too late.
In the meantime, yes we should figure out how to make the most of increasing CO2 levels and the benefits that they do have, while also preparing for the worst. That is just common sense.
Ben, this is not overstated, it is simply factual:
“The only important impacts of higher CO2 levels, thus far, are very positive. All the significant “negative effects” are hypothetical, but the > +15% increase in agricultural productivity, and the dramatic greening of the the Earth, are real, and well-measured.”
What about that do you think is “overstated?”
I trust that you do not deny that today’s climate is preferable to the climate of 1750 AD. Right?
Rich, I emailed ClimateState, asking them to un-ghost my comments, but to no avail. For now, at least, this comment is hidden from you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAPPq43iRLs&lc=UgwoHMIsrIAk3zYoFY14AaABAg
So here’s a copy of it (some of which I already posted here; please forgive the duplication):
9:00 Rignot: “One millimeter [of sea-level rise] is about 300 gigatonnes of ice melt.”
It actually takes 362 gigatonnes of ice melt, if the melting ice is all above sea-level, to raise global sea-level by one millimeter. It takes even more if some of the ice is below sea-level.
17:13 Rignot: “the sea ice cover is disappear, pretty soon we can have no sea ice left in the summer months. So the ocean is absorbing a lot more heat…”
3× wrong.
#1. In the first place the claim that pretty soon there will be no Arctic sea ice in the summer months is in defiance of all observational evidence.
#2. The sea ice minimum is not in “the summer months,” it is at the Fall Equinox, in September — when the sun is quite low in the sky.
#3. More fundamentally, the Arctic Ocean doesn’t get most of its heat by absorbing sunlight, it gets it from air and water currents from lower latitudes. That’s why the Arctic is so much warmer than Antarctica. More open water causes accelerated evaporative heat loss from the ocean.
What’s more, all that talk about Meltwater Pulse 1A is irrelevant. The water which fed Meltwater Pulse 1A didn’t materialize out of thin air. It occurred during the fastest retreat of the great Laurentide, Fennoscandian & Cordilleran ice sheets. Those ice sheets are gone, so they can’t melt now. Predictions of comparable sea-level rise in the 21st century are contra-scientific.
The observational fact is that 2/3 century of very heavy CO2 emissions and steadily rising CO2 levels have caused no detectable acceleration in the rate or sea-level rise. Here are some graphs:
http://sealevel.info/120-022_Wismar_and_1612340_Honolulu_vs_CO2_annot1.png
We’ve done the experiment, and we’ve seen the result. The last ~2/3 century of increasing CO2 levels and emissions have caused no increase at all in the rate of sea level rise. It is irrational and unscientific to expect that repeating that experiment over the next 2/3 century will have a significantly different result.
Where do you think meltwater on the scale of Meltwater Pulse 1A could come from?
Not Antarctica: It averages more than 40° below zero, so a few degrees of warming obviously won’t melt it. Antarctic ice accumulation & loss are in almost perfect balance. Some studies show it is gaining ice, some show it is losing ice, but all show that the net rate, whether positive or negative, is so tiny that it could cause less than 3 inches of sea-level change per century.
Greenland is losing ice mass, most years, but not much. The best estimates are that it averages around 50 ±25 cubic miles per year, which could contribute at most about 3.1 inches of sea-level rise per century.
That’s nothing new. Greenland has been losing a little bit of ice for a very long time, and human emissions of GHGs are not the cause.
Whats more, we know that during the MWP Greenland was significantly warmer than it is now, without causing any notable sea-level increase elsewhere in the world. We know it was warmer there then because the Vikings were able to grow barley there, and it is too cold to grow barley there now, even with modern, quick-maturing cultivars.
https://ancientfoods.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/viking-barley-in-greenland/
A warming climate causes processes which both increase and decrease sea-level rise. Based on the sea-level measurement record, it seems that when there’s no Laurentide ice sheet those processes roughly balance each other.
The only processes that most climate alarmists ever mention are melting and glacier calving, which raise sea-level. *But the most important process affecting ice sheet mass, in both Antarctica and Greenland, is snowfall.*
The magnitude and importance of snowfall on ice sheet mass balance (and thus sea-level) is illustrated by the story of Glacier Girl.
She’s a WWII Lockheed P-38 Lightning which was extracted in pieces from beneath 268 feet of accumulated ice and snow (mostly ice), fifty years after she made an emergency landing on the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Do the arithmetic and you’ll calculate an astonishing number: more than 5 feet of ice per year, which is equivalent to more than seventy feet of annual snowfall!
That ice and snow represents evaporated water, mostly from the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans, which then fell as ocean-effect snow on the Greenland Ice Sheet:
http://p38assn.org/glaciergirl/images/GPR-measurement-concept.jpg
The story of Glacier Girl is fascinating. You can read more about it here:
http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/glacier-girl-the-back-story-19218360/?all
and here:
http://p38assn.org/glacier-girl-recovery.htm
So, the key question is: what happens to snowfall in a warming climate?
The answer is that it increases, for two reasons.
First, it increases simply because warmer air holds more moisture. Every meteorologist knows that the biggest snowfalls occur when the temperature is not too far below freezing.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22too+cold+to+snow%22
Second, a warmer climate should reduce sea-ice extent, increasing evaporation from the Arctic, North Atlantic, and Southern Oceans, and thereby increasing Lake/Ocean-Effect Snowfall (LOES) downwind. (Ice-covered water does not produce LOES.)
When additional snow falls on ice sheets and glaciers, in adds to ice mass accumulation and subtracts from sea-level.
So, which effects are greater in a warming world? Those which decrease ice mass and increase sea-level, or those which increase ice mass and decreases sea-level?
The best evidence to answer that question is history, because we already have some experience with the effect of temperature changes on sea-level. What it tells us is that those opposing processes must be very similar in magnitude, because the approximately 1°C of warming which the Earth has experienced since “pre-industrial” (Little Ice Age) conditions was associated with only a very, very slight acceleration in sea-level rise, all of it more than 85 years ago. Sea-level is rising no faster now than it was >85 years ago, when CO2 was under 310 ppmv, and CH4 was 1.0 ppmv. A 30% increase in CO2 and an 80% increase in CH4 have caused no acceleration at all in the rate of sea-level rise, and there’s no reason to suppose that similar future increases will cause dissimilar results.
Dave, to your most recent reply, it is NOT true that CO2 only yields current benefits. Ocean acidification, a related, but separate, matter to climate change is primarily caused by the overproduction of CO2 emissions.
I am not going to debate your other points because they are not relevant. That is a HUGE claim to say it ONLY yields benefits. Most things have pros and cons, ESPECIALLY a greenhouse gas.
Chandler, wherever did you get the idea that harm from so-called “ocean acidification” is anything other than hypothetical, thus far?
The “problem” of ocean acidification is purely speculative.
In the first place, the oceans are alkaline, not acid, and no amount of CO2 emissions can change that. Additional dissolved CO2 just makes seawater slightly less caustic.
The greatest effect is on surface water, but AR5 estimates that the average pH of ocean surface water has decreased by just 0.1 since the beginning of the industrial era.
Ocean pH variations with time, location, basin & depth are all much, much greater than that tiny change. Yet those pH much larger pH variations do not seem to cause problems for marine life.
Look how much pH varies with depth in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and look how different the pH profiles in the two basins are from each other:
http://sealevel.info/pH-TCO2_NAtlantic_NPacific_vs_depth.png
Note that there’s 50x as much CO2 dissolved in the oceans as there is in the air, and only about 1/4 of the CO2 which mankind emits ends up in the oceans. So CO2 emissions have only a slight effect on the oceans.
Also, ocean chemistry buffers changes in pH due to carbonic acid from dissolved CO2.
Plus, higher levels of dissolved CO2 stimulates the growth of calcifying coccolithophores, which, when they die, carry calcium carbonate to the ocean depths (a negative feedback mechanism). This effect is surprisingly large; here are some references:
http://hub.jhu.edu/2015/11/26/rapid-plankton-growth-could-signal-climate-change
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151126165042.htm
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/111246/20151127/rapid-growth-of-plankton-caused-by-increased-carbon-levels-in-the-ocean.htm
https://www.academia.edu/13761237/Origin_and_Evolution_of_Coccolithophores_From_Coastal_Hunters_to_Oceanic_Farmers
Very well done,
I have reblogged this to my site, I hope that is okay with you.
https://goo.gl/9Ns3ux
Full credit and a link back is given
Thank you
In our life time, there might not be much problem with climate.
However the kids may be living on a more hostile planet.
See http://gopiswrong.net/environment.htm
this is utterly outdated reductionist thinking. Most environmentalists are also socialists and understand that climate change is about justice and unpredictability of world economics. Your argument amounts to: heat is good. That is childish. GLOBAL heat is destabilizing. Also, you are comparing apples to oranges. China and India are not Saudi arabia. Consuming more energy is dangerous and objectively impossible without redistributing wealth. Robots doing outdoor work plainly silly, and science fiction. You are not fooling me.
Many environmentalists and socialists have no idea about cause and effect, unintended consequences, the unpredictability of climate. Imposing your kind of justice is simply an excuse for totalitarianism.
Your argument seems to be that warmth is bad, dangerous and scary. Now that is really childish. Perhaps you should try spending a winter day in Canada without clothing housing or any unnatural source of warmth. You also seem to be telling me that you are not intelligent enough to adapt to a degree or two of warming.
I feel sorry for you. You must spend your days shaking in fear and attempting to frighten children. Read the above article again. Perhaps you will find a little reassurance.
You should spend a day in any part of the world ravaged by the forces of nature. Yes, man is intelligent, but economics aren’t. We can rebuild Houston, but Africa can’t rebuild so easily. These are basic facts.
Perhaps you should spend a day in Death Valley with no shelter or water. Hint,” Death Valley” isn’t just a pretty name.
Although questioning the validity of the CO2/warming mechanism has generally been viewed as naive and unintelligent, some recent developments have suggested that a second look might actually be advised.
It’s clear that the world 1) has warmed by about a centigrade degree over the past 50 years or so and that global temperature 2) remains elevated, but that 3) except for a major but temporary El Niño weather event, it has not significantly increased since 1998. This inconvenient reality differs from the CO2/warming mechanism as envisioned, which calls for temperature to increase in proportion to steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentration, but this no longer appears to be the case. Does this mean, therefore, that we have yet to identify a more credible warming agent?
Perhaps the first step in answering this important question is to identify any time periods during which global warming has actually occurred. In temperature time series that haven’t been tampered with, this condition is only met by the 24-year interval from 1975 to 1998. It was expectably (if unscientifically) assumed that the excellent correlation between rising atmospheric CO2 and rising temperature during this interval indicated a causal link, but for the 20 years since 1998, any such correlation has been lost. Before 1975, there also was no such correlation.
What happened, then, between 1975 and 1998? This was the period in which anthropogenic chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were introduced into the atmosphere before the Montreal Protocol was ratified to stop CFC production in the 1990s. It was recognized at the time that the photodissociation of CFCs released monatomic chlorine, causing the depletion of Earth’s ozone shield. This is still happening, since the depletion is catalytic and both CFCs and chlorine have long residence times in the atmosphere. A thinned ozone layer allows more solar ultraviolet-B radiation to reach Earth’s surface, where it is known to cause severe sunburn and genetic defects, but clearly something that can cause these can also cause global warming.
In support of this, total atmospheric equivalent chlorine, mainly derived from anthropogenic CFCs, is well correlated with the full temperature record, including the “global warming hiatus” since 1998, which may be seen as due to ratification of the Montreal Protocol. Also, non-aerosol-producing basaltic volcanoes, such as Iceland’s Bardarbunga, which, in 2014-15, underwent the world’s largest basaltic eruption since Laki in 1783, emit chlorine and bromine in the form of HCl and HBr, and these emissions likely also depleted ozone, which then led to the great El Niño of 2015-16. This concept, too, conforms well to the record of global temperature.
Note that, to my knowledge, ozone depletion is the only credible alternative mechanism to CO2/warming, and it does a far better job than the latter of accounting for the actual behavior of Earth’s full global temperature record. Consequently, efforts to mitigate CO2 emissions are likely futile, and should therefore probably be abandoned and replaced by a concerted effort to mitigate further atmospheric emission of halogen-bearing compounds.
The foregoing is supported by several reasons showing why CO2 can’t possibly function as a greenhouse gas in the Earth environment, which I can send you, or they can be found by searching for “B01N7ZXTID.”
I would welcome your thoughts on all this.
Sincerely,
David Bennett Laing
Water is an important greenhouse gas. As temperatures rise guess what? The amount of water in the atmosphere increases.
Not a single reference to any of the other species with whom we share this planet (oh, wait, there’s a reference to insects buried in there somewhere).
Yeah. I seem to recall reading something about extinction level destruction of species of late. No matter tho. We are already manufacturing robotic dogs and dragonfly surveillance cameras. We can use them to pollinate our fruit trees.
He has no clue about the complexities of the environment. We already have unleashed diseases by accident when we modified the environment, AIDS and ebola are examples. There are cascading impacts we no little of, so prudence says go slowly.
Only cataclysmic? Gee that makes me feel better. Obviously he is assuming he and/ children and/or grandchildren will survive. Which is not guaranteed.
“Simply moving water where it’s needed will continue as the mainstay of water management. Here California is the leader. The California Aqueduct, running 400 miles up and down mountain ranges to take water from the wetter north to the drier south, is just part of a colossal irrigation system that has made the state’s arid landscape an agricultural powerhouse. ”
I hope he realizes that climate change will destroy both this source and the Colorado River as a source of water as snow pack shrinks over the years, even under optimistic scenarios. CA won’t be the only place this happens.
He also cites huge infrastructure which costs billions to maintain. There is no will these days to invest in infrastructure.
“Meanwhile, countervailing developments that increase yields will outrun the effects of climate change and dramatically raise farm output. ”
Not without water. Water is the key and climate change the threat.
“less mechanized farms could set up battery-powered tents with AC and cold water to cool over-heated laborers.”
1) you need water which is disappearing. 2) most farms are too large to cover entire crops. You are talking about building green houses. As any green house operator how much effort it takes to keep blights and infestations out of green houses.
“But as apocalyptic as it seems, sea-rise poses little risk to human well-being. ” Ask New Orleans how that’s working out for them. A major reason
Anti-fracking movements would make gas-fired electricity, indispensable for balancing wind and solar, scarcer and more expensive than it needs to be. The green jihad against nuclear power, a safe and generally cheap source of reliable low-carbon energy, is especially counterproductive. ”
I think I know where he gets his money. BTW, fracking is done mostly with water.
If indeed water is such a problem, then why has global warming only become a recognized problem within the past 50 years? The only sensible answer to this question is that we have added some new component to the atmosphere within this time frame. CO2 is the obvious choice, but it’s turning out not to have the warming effect expected of it. Chkorine from anthropogenic CFCs, on the other hand, does have such an effect.
Read “chlorine” for Chkorine.”
Global warming wasn’t much studied or discussed before the 70’s. Remember back then computing power was low, there were no satellites, global exchange of information was slow and expensive. BTW, H2O (or dihydromonoxide as the joke goes) is an important GHG which increases in the atmosphere as temps. rise. Creating a feedback cycle.
I live in NEOH, just west of the fracking counties of my state. Water is used only in the initial cracking process. Once gas is escaping, water use ends. Water is so cheap in this area that it doesn’t pay to recycle frack water, so it is injected back under ground. If water scarcity ever increased market prices for water above the cost of recycling, ghen frack water will be cleaned and sold.
Economic realities will guide man’s actions in the face of unavoidable climate change….
How much water does it use per year. In the US, I’ll let you off the hook on other places.
I have read that frakers inject chemically treated water into the ground, chemicals that they will not identify. Thus the growing concern about pollution of aquifers. Ever see that video of the woman running flaming water out of her tap?
Mr. Lopez, you are an astute and observant individual.
@ Pedro Lopez,
–“He has no clue about the complexities of the environment. We already have unleashed diseases by accident when we modified the environment, AIDS and ebola are examples.”
AIDS is easily avoided with condoms and circumspection, and we now have an effective vaccine against ebola. Ongoing development in medicine and public health will steadily reduce the problem of infectious disease.
–“I hope he realizes that climate change will destroy both this source [the California Aqueduct] and the Colorado River as a source of water as snow pack shrinks over the years, even under optimistic scenarios.”
Not “destroyed,” possibly lessened. But as the snowpack dwindles as a storage reservoir, other storage infrastructure—more dams and reservoirs—can help make up the difference. In a worst-case scenario, desal could suffice. The Colorado River has a discharge of about 16,000,000 acre-feet per year; if the river ran dry that entire volume could be supplied by desal for about $11 billion per year at Israeli prices, a tiny fraction of the GDP of states that draw water from the river.
–“He also cites huge infrastructure which costs billions to maintain. There is no will these days to invest in infrastructure.”
Huh? Trillions of dollars are invested in new infrastructure every year, and gigantic new cities have sprung up around the world in recent decades. I don’t understand where this is coming from.
–“1) you need water which is disappearing.”
Water is not “disappearing.” As you note upthread, Pedro, a warming atmosphere holds more moisture, which means that on average earth’s climate will get wetter.
–“You are talking about building green houses.”
No, Pedro, we’re talking about closet-sized cooling tents (or maybe trucks) for workers to take a break in, not covering entire farms with air-conditioned tents.
Mr. Lopez;
But in your immediately preceding post you say,
“As temperatures rise guess what? The amount of water in the atmosphere increases.”
But that moisture causes clouds to form. Clouds — which I understand are poorly modeled in the major computer models — do two or three things;
(1) They increase the Earth’s albedo, which will increase the amount of solar heat that gets reflected back into space.
(2) They precipitate out as rain. More clouds, more rain. That would seem to militate against the droughts you’re predicting.
(3) The water vapor in those clouds is coming from somewhere. That predominately will be the seas. Less water in the seas should imply *falling* sea levels, not rising.
(Unless, of course, it precipitates out as rain which runs back into the seas.)
Does it not come back down? So we get your predicted droughts but falling sea levels?
Or does it come down (as increased rainfall)? So we get your rising sea levels, but no droughts?
Lots of nonsense here from Pedro. He says, “We already have unleashed diseases by accident when we modified the environment, AIDS and ebola are examples.”
Uh, no. I’d say genetic mutations would be a better culprit, even if that’s not the case–yeah, there were no scourges or plagues prior to man’s modern inventions. I’m sure there are plenty of folks in Europe who would call out your historical ignorance on that.
Pedro says, “He also cites huge infrastructure which costs billions to maintain. There is no will these days to invest in infrastructure.”
Nonsense. The private sector invests at lot more efficiently & is a lot more voluminous when it comes to infrastructure investment. Where have you been living? See my article on this http://www.freewebs.com/professor_enigma/infrastructure which debunks your ignorant claim.
Pedro says, “I hope he realizes that climate change will destroy both this source and the Colorado River as a source of water as snow pack shrinks over the years, even under optimistic scenarios.”
Uh yeah, I’ve read a lot of those “scenarios” (Paul Ehrlich anyone?) from various sources, it’s a lot of scaremongering. I guess Pedro has NEVER looked at N. Hemisphere snow coverage over the past few decades.
Pedro’s ignorance should be taken w/ a large grain of salt.
Nicely detailed article. Not mentioned too is the proclivity of prosperous societies to have smaller families. As the last billion or so of 3rd world poor improve their standard of living, history shows they will have smaller families, thereby slowing the rate of population increase…
Dear sir,
I find this assesment of yours to be impossibly naive. At best. The opening summary of “climate change will barely slow our progress in the effort to raise living standards” is based on a false dichotomy. The touted “standard of living” is a poor yard stick of the problems we face- the yardstick would perhaps more appropraitely be termed “quality of life”. You skip over the fragility of ecosystems, as if we are independent of the notion of carrying capacity. A world of dead oceans, dessicated lands, unstable erratic climate and weather, you look at with the eyes of a man who has suffered a complete failure of empathy, imagination, and frankly shows no understanding of biology or the basic notion of a “food chain”.
Mr. Robertus;
You raise the issue of carrying capacity.
Prior to about the 1750’s / the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the Earth had supported about 2 billion people. On average, they lived on about $1000 / year (2015 dollars), frequently perished from starvation, and had a 30 to 40 year life-span.
After the Industrial Revolution — overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels — the Earth supports some 8 billion people. Average income is about $3000 / year, starvation is disappearing, and lifespans average 60-70 years.
Going back will require a tyranny to impose that.
Why do you argue for a bayonet at the base of your skull so that 3/4 of the world’s people must die, and the rest be impoverished?
Mr. Robertus;
You raise the issue of the Earth’s carrying capacity.
Before about 1750, the Earth supported about 2 billion people. Average per capita income was about $1000 per year (2015 dollars). Average lifespan was between 30 & 40 years. Starvation was common. It had been this way for eons.
The birth of the Industrial revolution — powered then and powered now primarily by fossil fuels — was about 1750. (James Watt invented the first practical steam engine in 1776.)
After the Industrial Revolution, human living conditions improved remarkably. Today, the Earth supports nearly 8 billion people. Their average per capita income is about $3000. Their lifespans vary between 60 & 70 years. And starvation is becoming vanishingly rare.
There is a widespread (and valid) suspicion that the Left, in their drive to rid us of fossil fuels, has a hidden agenda to rid us of the Industrial Revolution: To return us to an earlier (and romanticized) bucolic agrarian paradise. Which is, of course, a fiction. Hobbes was much more nearly correct — describing life in such a state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.
Dear Reader;
I apologize for the double post. Some hours after the first post, it still had not appeared. I assumed the editors had found it too harsh and banned it. And so I prepared its more temperate brother which you see here. Again, my apologies.
@Fred…
You were going pretty good there for a while. Then off the rails you went.
Please stick with citations of scientific and historical data. Leave the political rants to the Fox News blogs. As a member of the Right, you have no idea of the intentions of the Left, which is no more monolithic than your side.
As for your point, as they say in fund prospectuses, past performance is no guarantee of future gains.
Moral of this story: Don’t lose your head, but don’t bury it in the sand, either. Just use it to help us out of this mess. We can do it!
One critical omission that needs to be addressed. How will we ski?
This is a truly remarkable, eye-opening article. It certainly challenged my worldview and made me think critically. The only question I have the was left unanswered was the issue of biodiversity.
Every issue you discuss in the article is regarding human-caused issues that can be human-solved. Perhaps this is also the case for biodiversity loss, but it does seem to have a distinction. It is well established that many species will be unable to adapt and survive climate change. This is in-part due to habitat loss, but temperature change, ocean-acidification, and other causes attributable to carbon and climate change will likely cause the extinction of many species across trophic-levels.
How would you respond to this issue of biodiversity loss? Is biodiversity loss distinguishable from the issues you present, or is it equally solvable? Please feel free to challenge any of my assumptions or claims. I am genuinely curious. I found this article incredibly eye-opening and thought-provoking. Thanks!
Good question — Boisvert will not be able to answer it, as he’s entirely lost track of “ecosystem services” and other environmental goods that (1) supply 2x world GDP in benefits to humans (read Costanza) and (2) b/c such goods (biodiversity) are neither owned nor priced in markets, which means that they will continue to be overexploited. His best shot is that tech can replace that flow of benefits, but there’s no sign of that (check the research on carbon capture…)
So this post is over-optimistic, but that’s pretty common for someone from the Breakthrough Inst.
@ David Zetland,
David, I don’t think the loss of ecosystem services from global warming will pose much risk to human welfare.
1. The Costanza estimates that you cite are kind of squishy. Their 1997 paper cites a range of values for ecosystem services from $16 trillion to $54 trillion, with an average of $33 trillion, and benchmark that against world GDP of $18 trillion. But that GDP figure seems too low; World Bank data put 1997 nominal global GDP at $31 trillion. So Costanza may have exaggerated the disparity between ecosystem GDP and human GDP.
2. Costanza’s accounting includes a lot of ecosystem services that aren’t essential but that really inflate the nominal value. For example, under the category of marine ES, the dollar value they assign to “cultural” and “recreational” services provided by oceans is larger than the dollar value of “food production” services.
3. Since 1997, world real GDP has risen by 73 percent in constant 2010 dollars, and nearly doubled in terms of purchasing power parity. Presumably the ecosystem has not increased its production since 1997 (it’s probably lost some because of human encroachments). So the relative size of eco-system contributions to human welfare has shrunk a lot since 1997, and is certainly no longer twice the size of the human GDP by Costanza’s accounting. ES will continue to shrink relative to global GDP in the coming century.
4. Much of world GDP growth has enabled humans to substitute and replace ecosystem services, further marginalizing their importance to human welfare. In Israel, for example, a large share of the water-provisioning services that used to be supplied by the ecosystem’s rivers, lakes and aquifers are now supplied by desal plants.
5. Climate change isn’t going to completely eliminate ecosystems. Most of what they provide to us now they will still provide after global warming.
6. Given all this, the idea that climate change will deprive us of ecosystem services to a degree that will really harm us seems pretty far-fetched to me.
@Chandler,
Right, loss of biodiversity is a serious issue. I don’t think it presents a substantial threat to human material interests. (We actually rely on a pretty small group of plants and animals to sustain us, and we are good at nurturing them in all sorts of conditions.) But just as climate change will drown coastlines and cities that we cherish, so it could destroy some biomes and species that we value as well. That should weigh in the balance when we consider how fast decarbonization should go.
We can help mitigate global extinctions with targeted interventions. Biologists are discussing plans to save polar bears by dropping food to them when the ice won’t support seal-hunting. We may also set up preserves in northerly latitudes to transplant species that are threatened by warming.
But again, we need to get some perspective. The impacts of global warming pale beside those of farming, fishing and logging, which are far and away the biggest anthropogenic threats to biodiversity, and getting bigger as populations rise. Actions to limit the extent and impact of those activities will probably be more important than forestalling climate change in preventing species loss.
For example, intensive aquaculture may enable us to restrict commercial fishing or ban it altogether, which would ease pressure on ocean wildlife. Raising agricultural yields can limit the land that goes under the plow and thus let us preserve or restore wild habitat. Biofuels, a nominally “renewable” energy source, have a huge and very destructive land and environmental footprint, and there’s a strong case for banning them on biodiversity and other grounds. We need to make sure that decarbonization policy doesn’t unintentionally work against other environmental goals.
Thank you for addressing biodiversity. It was the one thing I noticed you didn’t address. Also, thank you for helping to solidify why I have been feeling so skeptical about policy and yet I can’t deny the science. Was feeling like I was approaching cognitive dissonance.
Pedro Lopes wrote, “He has no clue about the complexities of the environment. We already have unleashed diseases by accident when we modified the environment, AIDS and ebola are examples.”
No, Pedro, AIDS and ebola are not caused by climate change.
bruceb wrote, “I have read that frakers inject chemically treated water into the ground, chemicals that they will not identify.”
Probably mainly surfactants (detergent), mild acid, and proppants (sand).
bruceb wrote, “Thus the growing concern about pollution of aquifers.”
Aquifers are not fracked. Fracking depths are typically way below the aquifers. So that “concern” is misplaced.
bruceb wrote, “Ever see that video of the woman running flaming water out of her tap?”
Yes, it’s propaganda.
In some places, well water naturally bubbles with large amounts of methane. Years ago, on my great uncle’s farm near Brook, Indiana, their water well and pump were housed in small wooden “pumphouse” structure separated from the farmhouse. The pumphouse roof wasn’t fastened to the walls, because so much methane bubbled out with the water that it had a tendency to accumulate in the shack and occasionally explode. My uncle intentionally didn’t attach the roof to the walls, so that when it exploded it just blew the roof off without knocking down the walls.
That was long before anyone had ever heard of “fracking.”
David Robertus wrote, “the fragility of ecosystems, as if we are independent of the notion of carrying capacity. A world of dead oceans, dessicated lands, unstable erratic climate and weather…”
That’s all contra-scientific nonsense. The reality is that higher CO2 levels are greening the planet, improving agricultural productivity, causing deserts to retreat, and making most plants more drought-tolerant.
The only important impacts of higher CO2 levels, thus far, are very positive. All the significant “negative effects” are hypothetical, but the > +15% increase in agricultural productivity, and the dramatic greening of the the Earth, are real, and well-measured.
Here’re a couple of articles about what CO2 emissions are doing to the environment. The 2nd one is National Geographic.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160413120341/https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17523610-300-africans-go-back-to-the-land-as-plants-reclaim-the-desert/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
Excerpt:
I didn’t add the word “indisputable,” it’s in from the article.
low-flow shower heads? why? why would anyone want or need low-flow shower heads at at $715 per acre-foot of water ?
Low-flow shower heads are a manifestation of left wing authoritarianism that you should be railing against, not citing as evidence of progress. No one buys them voluntarily. They are forced on an unwilling public. It is against the law to manufacture or sell higher flow shower heads. Due to legislative over-reach, people are forbidden to make their own decisions about how much water they want to use when they take a shower. It’s their shower, and it’s their water bill. Let them make up their own minds.
You can’t use herbicides, pesticides or different harsh chemical substances in an aquaponic system, making the fish and crops healthful and suitable
for eating.
There is no valid physics supporting the contention that radiation from one molecule of cold carbon dioxide in every 2,500 other air molecules can cause heat transfer into the warmer surface and thus raise the temperature. Long-established physics may be used to explain why greenhouse gases can only COOL us, which is why rain forests are cooler than deserts at similar latitude and altitude. For the correct science visit my website.
The website is http://whyitsnotco2.com and my papers are at https://ssrn.com/author=2627605