It’s a great time to be depressed about the
fate of Earth. The last United Nations confab on climate change, a November
meeting in Durban, South Africa, suggested we were unlikely to see any new deal
on greenhouse gasses having an impact before 2020.
It was
over less than a day before Canada withdrew from what is the only current
legally binding treaty on climate change — the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at
the end of this year. The United States never signed up for Kyoto in the first
place, of course, and Barack Obama’s administration has hardly been leading the
charge for a replacement.
Meanwhile,
we are less than three months away from the next big environmental summit,
Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, and it would be fair to
say expectations for the event are modest. Which is to say climate change was
off the table before the table was set up, and even the idea of changing the
name of the United Nations Environment Program to the United Nations
Environment Organization was considered too ambitious by negotiators.
But for
all the international diplomats desperate to affirm the self-worth of
pessimists and doomsayers worldwide, it is important to put climate change in a
broader context. It is a vital global issue — one that threatens to slow the
worldwide march toward improved quality of life. Climate change is already
responsible for more extreme weather and an accelerating rate of species
extinction and may ultimately kill off as many as 40 percent of all living
species. But it is also a problem that we know how to tackle, and one to which
we have some time to respond before it is likely to completely derail progress.
Start
with the economy. The Stern Review, led by the distinguished British economist
Nicholas Stern, is the most comprehensive look to date at the economics of
climate change. It suggests that, in terms of income, greenhouse gasses are a
threat to global growth, but hardly an immediate or catastrophic one.
Take
the impact of climate change on the developing world. The most depressing
forecast in terms of developing country growth in Stern’s paper is the “A2
scenario,” one of a series of economic and greenhouse gas emissions forecasts
created for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s a model
that predicts slow global growth and income convergence (poor countries
catching up to rich countries).
But
even under this model, Afghanistan’s GDP per capita climbs sixfold in the next
90 years, India and China ninefold and Ethiopia’s income increases by a factor
of 10. Knock off a third for the most pessimistic simulation of the economic
impact of climate change suggested by the Stern report and people in those
countries are still markedly better off — four times as rich for Afghanistan, a
little more than six times as rich for Ethiopia.
It’s
worth emphasizing that the Stern report suggests that the costs of dramatically
reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is closer to 1 (or maybe 2) percent of world
GDP, in the region of $600 billion to $1.2 trillion today. The economic case
for responding to climate change by pricing carbon and investing in alternate
energy sources is a slam dunk. But for all the likelihood that the world will
be a poorer, denuded place than it would be if we responded rapidly to reduce
greenhouse gases, the global economy is probably not going to collapse in the
next century even if we are idiotic enough to delay our response to climate
change by a few years.
What
about the impact on global health? Suggestions that malaria has already spread
as a result of climate change, and that malaria deaths will expand dramatically
as a result of warming in the future, don’t fit the evidence of declining
deaths and reduced malarial spread in the last century. The authors of a recent
study published in the journal Nature conclude that the forecasted future
effects of rising temperatures on malaria “are at least one order of magnitude
smaller than the changes observed since about 1900 and about two orders of
magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of
key control measures.” In other words, climate change is and will likely remain
a small factor in the toll of malaria deaths into the foreseeable future.
What
about other diseases? Christian Zimmermann at the University of Connecticut and
Douglas Gollin at Williams evaluate the likely impact of a 3-degree rise in
temperatures on tropical diseases like dengue fever, which causes half a
million cases of hemorrhagic fever and 22,000 deaths each year. Most of the
vectors for such diseases — mosquitoes, biting flies and so on — do poorly in
frost. So if the weather stays warmer, these diseases are likely to spread. At
the same time, there are existing tools to prevent or treat most tropical
diseases, and Zimmerman and Gollin suggest “rather modest improvements in
protection efficacy could compensate for the consequences of climate change.”
It is
the same with agriculture. Global warming will have many negative (and a few
positive) impacts on food supply, but it is likely that other impacts — both
positive, including technological change, and negative, such as the exhaustion
of aquifers — will have far bigger effects. The 2001 IPCC report suggested that
climate change during the long term could reduce agricultural yields by as much
as 30 percent. Compare that with the 90 percent increase in rice yields in
Indonesia between 1970 and 2006, for example.
Again,
while climate change will make extreme weather and natural disasters like
flooding and hurricanes more common, the negative effect on the global quality
of life will be reduced if economies continue to grow. That is because, as
Matthew Kahn from Tufts University has shown, the safest place to suffer a
natural disaster is in a rich country. The more money that people and
governments have, the more they can both afford and enforce building codes,
land use regulations and public infrastructure such as flood defenses that
lower death tolls.
Too
many environmentalists suggest that dealing with climate change will take
immediate and radical retooling of the global economy. It won’t. It is
affordable, practical and wouldn’t take a revolution. Giving out the message
that the only path to sustainability will require medieval standards of living
only puts everyone else off.
And
once you’ve convinced yourself the world is on an inevitable course to
disaster, the only logical thing to do is to sit back, put your Toms shoes on
the couch and drink micro-brewed herbal tea until civilization collapses.
Climate change isn’t like that — or at the very least, isn’t like that yet.
So, if
you’re really just looking for a reason to strap on the “end of the world is
nigh” placards and go for a walk, you can find better excuses — like, say, the
threat of global thermonuclear war or a rogue asteroid. The fight to curb
greenhouse gas emissions is one for the hard-nosed optimist.
Charles
Kenny
The
Jakarta Globe
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