Embracing Global Warming
Oh, there are losers in the US. The tourist economy in Northern Wisconsin has lost a lot of money because of a lack of snow. There is also a lot of pain here as some of the more formerly indelible folkways hinged on a powerful winter climate and are crumbling away without it.
Elsewhere, this article gives a sense of the range of possible impacts, including the abandonment of the Florida coast. But not all the impacts would be negative economically, as the same article mentions. In fact, for at least three years there has been discussion of how a new Northwest Passage could be good for business.
If Sunstein is right, China is in a similar position. Global Warming would cause dislocation but not chaos, and it might even open some new opportunities in some regions.
Europe, on the other hand, is quite vulnerable. I don’t have a link at hand, but if memory serves their scariest scenario involves a change in sea temperature shifting the course of the Gulf Stream. This does not have to go the global extremes shown in the movie, The Day after Tomorrow, to be pretty devastating regionally. Also, as Sunstein notes, any nation with lots of people living in tidal regions is going to be in serious difficulty. (So farewell to parts of Bangladesh and to Venice.)
So what is there to do? Ethics suggest that the US and China should change because it is wrong to put so much of the world in peril. Unfortunately both the Chinese dictatorship and the American people are pretty reluctant to give up the comforts of the present without personal motivation. That is possible. The cost of energy is forcing some improvement. Sunstein points out that it’s possible that Global Warming might be more serious here and in China than some predict. (Certainly more heat deaths and more nasty tornadoes are two pretty straightforward outcomes of climate warming.) A greater willingness to consider the downside might also shift decision making a bit.
That’s all to the good, but, practically speaking, climate change encourages human actions that accelerate that change even more. When I moved to Wisconsin in 1991, many of my neighbors did not have air conditioning. This was not simply a matter of money. It just did not seem necessary. The house we moved into did have central air, but we ran it rarely. One summer in the early ‘90s, we did not run it at all.
We still do not run it constantly—the high was only in the mid-70s yesterday-- but we have felt the necessity of it more as the hot spells have gotten either hotter or longer. More of our neighbors have invested in AC, too.
So what’s the problem? As William Saletan points out in one of his periodic columns on science, air conditioners produce more heat than they eliminate. As Saletan puts it:
The hotter it gets, the more energy we burn. In 1981, only one in three American households with central air used it all summer long. By 1997, more than half did. Countries once cooled by outdoor air now cool themselves. In Britain, 75 percent of new cars have air conditioning. In Canada, energy consumption for residential cooling has doubled in 10 years, and half the homes now have central or window units. Kuujjuaq, an Eskimo village 1,000 miles north of Montreal, just bought 10 air conditioners. According to the mayor, it's been getting hot lately.Instead of fixing the outdoors, we're trying to escape it.
From the stand point of individual decision making, that is rational. If you can’t change what is happening, adapt to it and make the most of it. The more we make the most of it, the more we encourage it. So individual rationality results in mass madness.