Climate Change: the Consequences

“I’m not a scientist,” it is reported, is the form of the latest Republican avoidance of what those scientists have predicted about the effects of global warming. Perhaps if you are neither a scientist nor scientifically literate—that is, not able to understand what scientists are saying when put into lay language (give me a break!)--another tack is appropriate, one that would also be useful for those of us who are believers.  (Not being well read in the relevant literature, I may well  be suggesting what has already been widely proposed and even carried out; it which case, regard these few paragraphs as support.)

   Most of the predictions by climate scientists state, sensibly, what will happen to our globe. If remedial actions are not taken, glaciers will melt this much, the level of the ocean will rise so many inches and the chemistry of the water will change in that way, while the rise in air temperature will affect the weather in this way—and so on. That’s the climate scientists job: to predict the rise in temperature during a given time span and to spell out the consequences for the world as a result of the predicted change.

   But there are other changes that can be predicted, but to calculate them the climate scientists—mostly academics—would have to collaborate with experts in quite a variety of different fields. What I have in mind is that predictions be made about what will have to be done to accommodate to the predicted changes and what they would cost.

   To do this for the entire globe is surely impossible or nearly so. Instead, a relatively small number of cases would have to be picked. I would suggest that three criteria be used to make the selections. [1] that the collaborating scientists and professionals are sufficiently sure of their data and calculations so as to be able to overcome the arguments of skeptics—at least for those willing to listen. [2] That the damage or the needed remedial action not be trivial or even capable of being ignored. And [3] that the examples selected have political clout, so to speak. There are no doubt many people, to provide a negative example, who while perhaps regretting that polar bears would be a disappearing species would not lose an hour’s sleep over that prospect. Not a good example of what I have in mind.

     Experts would thus not only work up the examples, but they would also need their expertise to select those that have heuristic force. Accordingly, I myself am only capable of suggesting a couple of  half-baked examples, baked just enough to give an idea what I have in mind.

   Take California’s Imperial Valley, the source of a significant fraction of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the United States. Ten additional years of global warming (with no significant actions taken to combat it) will surely have its effect on what takes place in that fertile region. Will it reduce to yield of some species or make it impossible to grow them at all? Will it take so much more water to grow what has traditionally been grown in the region? And what will be the cost of that additional water and, perhaps, the additional installations needed to have it serve its purpose—or can the needed augmentation of water be made available at all? And for every move that will then be required there is a dollar cost that can be estimated—if not with precision, with plausible approximation. It matters that examples are worked out with specificity and that the calculations conclude with a statement of the dollars expected to be lost.

   A second significant example might be the effect of the rise of the ocean level on a significantly populated area. While New Orleans is an obvious such a one, Hurricane Katrina has probably desensitized too many people to the woes of that region. It would be better if one could show serious damage and major cost to the New York or Boston areas—caused by another decade’s worth of global warming. That would be distinctly scarier than what is already known about the much more sparsely populated delta of the Mississippi. Scarier and politically more effective.

  I repeat—surely unnecessarily—that I do not have the knowledge to select actual examples that are viable for the purpose I have in mind. I just hope that what I have said shows a way to rattle at least some of the cages that harbor those who dismiss warming as exaggerated or harmless.