Environmental Economics

A Tipping Point is the moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire, the point where something previously rare suddenly becomes common (1). Fashion is an obvious example, where certain styles and patterns are virtually unseen for decades, and then suddenly booms for a couple of years, after which they fade back into negligence. In many ways, the rise and fall of ideas resembles the rise and fall of epidemics.

This article will focus on the rise and fall (and rise and fall) of climate change concerns.

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Last week, NASA held a conference on solar activity, showing the results of Ulysses’ third and last orbit around the sun (1). “The sun cycles between periods of great activity and lesser activity. Right now, we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated,” explained Ed Smith, NASA’s Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “When the results of the third scan were compared with observations from the previous solar cycle, the strength of the solar wind pressure and the magnetic field embedded in the solar wind were found to have decreased by 20 percent. The field strength near the spacecraft has decreased by 36 percent.”

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It is not easy to be worried about average temperature increases of a few degrees over the rest of your life if the temperatures you experience change ten times as much every single day.

Consequently, much of the concern around global warming is focused on associated effects, such as the melting of glaciers, sea-level rise, floods, droughts, hurricanes, an increase in the frequency and severity of the El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and possible abrupt climate changes, such as the shut-down of the thermohaline circulation (MOC) which brings warm waters and mild climates to northern Europe.

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Most humans have a preference for temperatures around 20°C. If the climate is hotter, they use air-conditioners to bring down the temperature, and if it is colder, they use heating systems to increase the temperature.

Except the poor, who cannot afford air-conditioners and heating systems. They just have to accept the climate as it is, and accept the resulting inconveniences in terms of increased mortality and decreased productivity. Especially if they are too poor to move to a place with a better climate.

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“Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get”
Robert A. Heinlein

Between 1905 and 2005, the average global air temperature near the Earth’s surface increased by somewhere between 0.5 and 1.0 degrees Celsius. Climate model projections summarized by the IPCC indicate that average global surface temperature will likely rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C during this century (1).

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During the last 100 years, we have experienced four rounds of significant climate change. In 1912, when Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk, the New York Times reported that “Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.” Los Angeles Times the same year: “Fifth ice age is on the way. Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.”

Global temperatures were indeed unusually cold during the first decades of the previous century (see Figure 1 below), and ice age warnings regularly popped up in the media: Los Angeles Times, 1923: “The possibility of another Ice Age already having started… is admitted by men of first rank in the scientific world, men specially qualified to speak.” Chicago Tribune, 1923: “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada.” Read More »

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

I am sure these enourmous efforts were done with the best of intentions, but I am not so sure they are contributing to World Peace. Certainly, a lot of wasteful and harmful policies are being implemented under the guise of fighting climate change.

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Climate change has suddenly become a hot research topic in Bolivia (1). The glaciers in the highlands are melting, the lowlands are flooded, and the government has declared a state of national emergency due to natural disasters. It is a good time to ask how climate change might be affecting the poor Bolivians.

But first let’s check exactly what climate changes we are talking about.

The National Meteorological Service (www.senamhi.gob.bo) provides useful data for 33 different stations across Bolivia. They provide daily minimum and maximum temperatures since 1/1/2004 until yesterday, as well as historical monthly averages for the 1961-1990 period, which can be used for comparison. It is therefore relatively simple to calculate daily temperature anomalies for different parts of Bolivia.

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Carbon-offsetting (paying others not to emit carbon into the atmosphere so that you can keep emitting) recently got an absolutely hilarious equivalent: CheatNeutral (http://www.cheatneutral.com/).

This brilliant initiative allows you to pay somebody else to be faithful, so that you keep going on as usual. Of course it is recommended that you first look for ways of reducing your cheating. But once you have done this, you can use CheatNeutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating. This supposedly neutralizes the pain, unhappiness and heartbreak in the atmosphere and leaves you with a clear conscience.

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There are many gigantic problems in the world (hunger, diseases, wars, corruption, lack of safe water, pollution, climate change, etc.), but there are also a great many efforts to solve these problems (hundreds of professional development organizations, thousands of NGOs, millions of volunteers, billions of dollars of foreign aid).

So, why is progress towards solving these problems so painfully slow?

One possibility may be that we haven’t gotten our priorities straight. Clearly we can’t fix everything at once (if we could, all the problems would already have been solved), so we should try to apply the limited funds available for fixing global problems to the areas where they can do the most good.

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