Friday, February 04, 2005
We're all going to die!
The Examiner has an interesting interview about someone challenging the "We're all going to die"ism of global warming warners. It's an interesting read. It points out that global warming has benefits that are rarely considered, and there are better things to worry about. As an economist, he presents:
We can do fairly little about global warming at a fairly high cost...
The top four priorities we identified are doing something about HIV/AIDS, doing something about malnutrition, doing something about free trade and doing something about malaria.
Those four things are things where for very little investment, we can do immense amounts of good.
I'm not one for doing good, but global warming folks usually are, so take heed.
Elsewhere in the paper, coincidentally, there is a story about some commission warning about how global warming is going to, yes, cause us all to die, by making it more difficult to grow rice in the places where rice is grown. One thing that always bugs me about these Chicken Littles is that they are ridiculously conservative. It seems like the reasonable thing to do would be to conclude that global warming will change the climate, and force rice farming to move to a new region of the planet. This new region wouldn't have been able to grow rice before, but climate change would make growing rice possible.
Of course, we'll see no such thing. Instead, we hear that "If we keep doing everything as we are doing now, we won't be able to continue in the face of climate change." While this is true, it's hardly relevant. We should be comparing the costs associated with trying to stop global warming with the cost associated with adapting to a changing climate.
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