Stern, Lomborg and Yohe on the cost of climate change
How expensive is climate change, what's the cost of stopping it, and should we pay now or pay later? Scientific American gets a three-sided look at these questions in side-by-side interviews with Nicholas Stern, Bjorn Lomborg and Gary Yohe.
Stern and Yohe push raising the price of carbon emissions via caps and taxes, respectively, as insurance to ward off big future risks, with Lomborg taking the contrarian view that we shouldn't mitigate until renewable energy is cheaper -- and shrugging off the risks. (Lomborg thinks that other problems like HIV/AIDS and malaria need money more immediately, an argument Olive Heffernan took on in NRCC's editorial last month.) Interesting discussions of the values assigned to human lives in the present vs. future (Stern, Lomborg), and to lives threatened by asbestos vs. temperature rise, also ensue.
Anna Barnett
Comments
The economics of climate change:
If an author of such a report didn't understand how the weather affected the sale of a product, would the report be reliable?
If an author of such a report was not to realise that a combination of weather elements controls every single action a consumer makes, would the report be reliable?
If an author of such a report was not to realise that this specific combination of weather elements loses the UK retail industry £60m per day and in the US $1bn per day, would the report be reliable?
The reason for these losses is that retailers do not fully understand that this combination of weather elements affects every action their custsomers take, it is called natural desire - but they can't accurately forecast it is for two reasons.
1. they don't understand what drives consumer desire.
2. they don't have a measure of consumer desire.
My 9 years research about how the weather affects the retail business, has made some remarkable discoveries. The main one being that every human's action, thought and memory is a reaction to air, heat, light and water (the weather.
We don't give these actions a second thought, in fact no thought at all, they are completely spontaneous to the external stimuli.
So is the report reliable?
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Posted by: Neil Catto | December 3, 2007 11:25 AM
The oceans are said to be increasing in surface temperature. This means that there should be more evaporation. The extra water that floats up can not remain there. As some countries such as America and Australia are in drought then where is the water falling.
It must be over oceans apart from occasional floods on land.
Then why?
Perhaps the ever increasing number of jet aircraft flying at 35000 feet mostly over oceans and emitting small amounts of soot and sulfur dioxide are causing precipitation over oceans and with it depletion of water in clouds that reach land. If this is the case then it seems nobody wants to know about it.
The high level haze created by jets is constantly visible in some locations.
Posted by: Stringer | December 3, 2007 09:22 PM