Information revelation and global warming :: Marginal Revolution
But is the issue whether the earth will be warmer over the next decade or is it whether human activity is a sizeable cause of warming?
But is the issue whether the earth will be warmer over the next decade or is it whether human activity is a sizeable cause of warming?
posted by John B. Chilton at 8/21/2005 09:09:00 PM
1 Comments:
It's silly to any wager on weather on a ten-year timeline, because even if weather has a long-term trend toward warming (which it has), any given ten years could fluctuate fairly wildly. (As an economist, you should know somethng about these things.)
The real issue is this: are our activities contributing to global climate change? The evidence increasingly has been pointing to yes. Will we do the very expensive shifts necessary to do anything about it? The evidence points to no. Why? Well, part of it is because of how disciplines such as economics deal with evidence on very long timelines: that is to say, not. Without the kind of economic analysis that everyone's been trained to accept at hand, economists such as yourself, and national leaders such as the ones currently leading the United States, will continue to understand nothing about what will eventually happen - that climate change will be catastrophic to our world's environment, that it will drastically change the current order of things, and that we as humans will - as we've always done - at first die like flies, and then create pockets of sustainability surrounded by a sea of sorrow.
But what the heck: we'll all be gone by then, and those politicians will long since have served out their second term.
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