Global Changes

While I see much written about global warming - most of it seems to assume that everything will be bad - as if we have to avoid it or we are doomed, etc. (maybe we will be...) I had noticed that there is a group in Siberia that is in favor of global warming.

The author of this non-scientific article, Global Warming: Who Loses—and Who Wins?, from last April's Atlantic muses about possible consequences (notice that he is mostly concerned with economic consequences):

....nearly all the added land-value benefits of a warming world might accrue to Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Russia, and Scandinavia.

This raises the possibility that an artificial greenhouse effect could harm nations that are already hard pressed and benefit nations that are already affluent. If Alaska turned temperate, it would drive conservationists to distraction, but it would also open for development an area more than twice the size of Texas. Rising world temperatures might throw Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and other low-latitude nations into generations of misery, while causing Canada, Greenland, and Scandinavia to experience a rip-roarin’ economic boom. Many Greenlanders are already cheering the retreat of glaciers, since this melting stands to make their vast island far more valuable. Last July, The Wall Street Journal reported that the growing season in the portion of Greenland open to cultivation is already two weeks longer than it was in the 1970s.

And Russia! For generations poets have bemoaned this realm as cursed by enormous, foreboding, harsh Siberia. What if the region in question were instead enormous, temperate, inviting Siberia? Climate change could place Russia in possession of the largest new region of pristine, exploitable land since the sailing ships of Europe first spied the shores of what would be called North America....

Even the most optimistic scenario for reform envisions decades of additional greenhouse-gas accumulation in the atmosphere, and that in turn means a warming world. The warming may be manageable, but it is probably unstoppable in the short term. This suggests that a major investment sector of the near future will be climate-change adaptation. Crops that grow in high temperatures, homes and buildings designed to stay cool during heat waves, vehicles that run on far less fuel, waterfront structures that can resist stronger storms—the list of needed adaptations will be long, and all involve producing, buying, and selling. Environmentalists don’t like talk of adaptation, as it implies making our peace with a warmer world. That peace, though, must be made—and the sooner businesses, investors, and entrepreneurs get to work, the better.

Why, ultimately, should nations act to control greenhouse gases, rather than just letting climate turmoil happen and seeing who profits? One reason is that the cost of controls is likely to be much lower than the cost of rebuilding the world. Coastal cities could be abandoned and rebuilt inland, for instance, but improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in order to stave off rising sea levels should be far more cost-effective. Reforms that prevent major economic and social disruption from climate change are likely to be less expensive, across the board, than reacting to the change. The history of antipollution programs shows that it is always cheaper to prevent emissions than to reverse any damage they cause.

Um....environmentalist have been encouraging "adaptation", ie. passive solar, public transit, urban-friendly neighborhoods for 30+ years. This environmentalist thinks that we should make peace with the world - and the sooner the better. There will be problems. Environmentalists get that. But environmentalists also get that people need to be making changes in housing, transportation, diets, and a whole slew of things.

Adaptation doesn't mean exploitation. Those who are focused on economics seem to ignore the problems of tearing down rainforests for a little natural gas. I see huge problems with the political and economic system that encourage consumption, waste, greed, and pollution - and that don't bother with alternative energies. With oil companies that get huge subsidies.

The oceans may be doomed - regardless. The greenhouse gases being absorbed into the oceans will mean the death of much sea life that had adapted to the ocean as it was. As someone said, "our children will tell their children to eat their jellyfish".

Many of problems that are related to "global warming" have become "living on the planet" problems. The mentality that disposable is better, that more is better - the creation of more things adds to global warming and it adds to pollution. The economics of greed that leads to factory farms, to industrial fishing adds to global warming, to pollution and the destruction of habitats, of water supplies. Such farms are created by people who are divorced from or who never lived in a rural community. The people who fish all of the fish off of the African coasts have no concern for the people's livelihoods that they are stealing or for the ecosystem that they are destroying.

In another article on global warming, Waterworld, the author quotes Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies.:

Here is how global warming indirectly feeds Islamic extremism. As rural Bangladeshis flee a countryside ravaged by salinity in the south and drought in the northwest, they are migrating to cities at a rate of 3 to 4 percent a year. Swept into the vast anonymity of sprawling slum encampments, they lose their local and extended-family links, becoming more susceptible to a form of Islam with a sharper ideological edge. “We will not have anarchy at the village level, where society is healthy,” warns Atiq Rahman. “But we can have it in the ever-enlarging urban areas.”

This problem of an un-healthy society (that Atiq says drives Islamic extremism) - may be the same thing that drives corporate economic hedonism. When people are not concerned for those of their community - I expect that it's easier to exploit, to justify tearing off mountain tops, to destroy ecosystems for fish or oil or gas. And the entire world (as well as our bodies) has become a trash-pit because of a lack of awareness or simple apathy to the global consequences.

Many people seem more concerned about the Dow than the Dao - the way of nature. People have not been adapting - corporations (and the people who run them) have been decimating/destroying/polluting as they fill their bank accounts.

It takes effort and will to become part of a community in this day and age. What with people moving as much as we do. It's not automatic. Lack of community attachment is no more an excuse for exploiting/polluting than it is for terrorizing.