Tim Flannery: The Weather Makers

I was a skeptic on global warming for a long time. It's not so much that I doubted the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as that I figured both the carbon cycle and the translation of greenhouse gases into actual weather were much more complex than the models presumed. That skepticism wasn't exactly ill-founded, but ultimately washed out in the noise. My other great doubt, about what the actual impacts (and plural is necessary here) of the climat changes (again plural) will be is still very much in play, but that some people (and many other species) will get hurt bad seems certain.

The book that brought these lessons home for me was Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, although it certainly helped that I read it during an uncomfortable trip to Florida in August. I figured it was time for an update, so I picked up Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (2006, Atlantic Monthly Press). I figured I had already read most of the other new book, Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change in The New Yorker, and could get the condensed version of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in movie form.

I didn't bother marking any quotes in the front of the book, probably because a lot of it rehearses well known information. First quote I marked summed up a long series of events (p. 140):

In terms of extreme weather events, it's worth recording that the United States already has the most varied weather of any country on Earth, with more intense and damaging tornadoes, flash floods, intense thunderstorms, hurricanes, and blizzards than anywhere else. With the intensity of such events projected to increase as our planet warms, in purely human terms the United States would seem to have more to lose from climate change than any other large nation. Indeed, its ever spiraling insurance bill resulting from severe weather events and its growing water shortrages in the west mean that the United States is already paying dearly for its CO2 emissions.

(p. 169):

In other words, it's too late to avoid changing our world, but we still have time, if good policy is implemented, to avoid disaster. Good policy, in Mastrandrea and Schneider's model, means a carbon tax of $200 per ton, implemented by 2050, which is sufficient to reduce the probability of dangerous climate change to zero.

(p. 177):

There is, surprisingly, one group of species that will benefit enormously from this aspect of climate change. These are the parasites that cause the four strains of malaria. As rainfall increases, the mosquitoes that carry the parasite will spread, the malarial season will lengthen, and the disease will proliferate. From Mexico City to Papua New Guinea's Mt. Hagen, the mountain valleys of the world support human populations in high densities. And they are healthy, glorious places in which disease, where population density is not too great, is rare. Just below these communities -- in the case of New Guinea at around 4,500 feet -- are great forests where no one lives. This is because of malaria, which is so prevalent in parts of the tropics that it controls human populations. In the new future, global warming will grant access to the malarial parasite and its vector the Anopheles mosquito to those high mountain valleys, and there they will find tens of thousands of people without any resistance to the disease.

(p. 208):

English environmental politician Aubrey Meyer pointed out how this matter is being discussed at the highest levels. Economists who participated in the IPCC discussions stated that doing anything seroius about climate change was too expensive to be worthwhile, leading in Meyer's view to "the effective murder of members of the world's poorer populations," whose lives by the economists' estimates were worth only a fifteenth of that of a rich person. I agree with Meyer that adaptation of this sort is genocide, and attempted Gaia-cide, as well.

(p. 234):

Economist Eban Goodstein has undertaken a detailed analysis of past projections of regulatory costs as they relate to a variety of industries. Goodstein demonstrated that in every case, when compared with the actual costs paid, the estimates were grossly inflated. His examples range from asbestos to vinyl, and in all instances but one the estimated cost flowing from regulatory change was at least double the actual cost paid, while in some cases estimates were even more exaggerated. This inflation of estimated costs holds regardless of whether industry itself or an independent assessor did the work, which suggests a systematic source of error.

Goodstein argues the reason for this discrepancy is that economists find it difficult to anticipate the innovative ways in which industry goes about complying with new regulations. In some isntances they dump the old processes altogether and adopt new, cost-effective ones, while in others they radically transform their entire business. The projections, in contrast, assume a business-as-usual approach that must absorb the burden of costs. Goodstein's analysis of projected versus actual costs for environmental cleanups provides another interesting outcome. In his study these tasks were almost always underestimated -- in some instances grossly so -- which leads one to wonder if the economists who calculate the estimates are ignorant of matters of the environment or, more nefariously, have an anti-environment bias.

(p. 235):

The National Climatic Data Center lists seventeen weather events that occurred betwen 1998 and 2002, which cost over a billion dollars apiece. They include droughts, floods, fire seasons, tropical storms, hailstorms, tornadoes, heat waves, ice storms, and hurricanes; the most expensive, at a cost of $10 billion, was the drought of 2002. This suggests that the costs of doing nothing about climate change are so large that the failure to calculate it bankrupts the argument.

Over the last four decades the insurance industry has been reeling under the burden of losses as a result of natural disasters, of which the impact of the 1998 El Niño offers a fine example. Paul Epstein of the Harvard Medical School calculated that, in the first eleven months of that year alone, weather-related losses totaled $89 billion, while 32,000 people died and 300 million were made homeless. This was more than the total losses experienced in the entire decade of the 1980s.

Sine the 1970s, insurance losses have risen at an annual rate of around 10 percent, reaching $100 billion by 1999. Losses at this scale threaten the very fabric of our economic system, for an annual increase in the damages bill of 10 percent means that the total bill doubles every seven or eight years. Such a rate of increase implies that by 2065 or soon thereafter, the damage bill resulting from climate change may equal the total value of everything that humanity produced in the course of a year.

Of course, the other factor that pushes the insurance issues to the top is the sheer amount of development. If humans were scarce and mobile, as they were in the stone age, most could adjust, moving on to more hospitable climes. But settlement locks us down, and the expropriation of so many of nature's niches makes us vulnerable to damage to each and every one. Insurance is also an issue because it seems likely that private risk insurance will not survive -- more and more the costs of disasters are being dumped onto government, and despite the usual anti-entitlement warnings of the right most people the need for government to settle accounts. On the other hand, in the US at least we live in a political system that favors private interests over public, and that is to a large extent dominated by private-interest lobbyists. It is, for instance, much easier for the coal industry to establish a lobbying presence in support of a limited but easily quantifiable set of economic goals than for those affected by burning coal -- victims of environmental and climate damage, pretty much everyone, but with a much weaker individual motivation.

posted 2007-01-23