Environmental Estimates

Climate change is an environmental factor which already influences the wildlife of UK. Sea level rise is affecting the coastal countries and is leading to unprecedented rates and of change to our coastal landscape and wildlife.

Climate change isn't the only thing affecting the ability of our earth to support life. We're killing forests, poisoning our rivers, fishing out the seas - the entirety of which is raining hell on Earth.

A qualitative estimate in the field and laboratory found that the carbon in Siberian permafrost decomposes readily and is released quickly when thawing occurs since It is not only the pool of carbon that is of interest, but also its reactivity (UKCIP).

The belief that a positive feedback mechanism operates between climate warming, forest fires and future climate change was also approved (Randerson, J.T et al. 2006). A conservative estimate concludes that due to past emissions we are already committed to 0.4 and 0.6 0C warming, and a corresponding 8-10cm of sea-level rise by 2100 (UKCIP, 2006).

What Climate Change increasingly bears in mind are uncertainties and unpredictable future consequences. Vulnerability to natural disaster, such as drought, and famine will increase causing massive environment migration and homelessness. People's suffering tends to escalate disproportionately after disaster which makes adaptation more difficult since people are not acting rationally under extreme emotional stress.

Economies move along balanced pathways and do not examine their adjustment in response to exogenous shocks, such as extreme weather events. They therefore neglect the fact that welfare losses from climate change impacts may be very different if they fall on prosperous versus weakened economies.

Economically the distribution of extremes – not just their average cost – must be taken into account when assessing potential damages of future extreme weather events for that matter of disruption in coping mechanism. Governments are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of adaptation, but there remains a gulf between policy and the day-to-day practice of adaptation to climate change.

Cameron Hepburn, an energy economist at Oxford University made remarks that: “Technological change tends to be disruptive to business models, and climate change will be a disruptive influence, creating danger for incumbents and opportunities for new entrants.”

The opportunity for businesses could be greater than the expenditure numbers suggest, because companies that can help reduce emissions will have an opportunity to displace their more polluting competitors.

And if politicians are serious about wanting to head off the threat of global warming, they have to put the policies in place to make it happen.

There is a need to improve the information exchange between CBOs, NGOs, academia and policymakers, and upscale these locally successful adaptation initiatives. Initiatives to advocate less greedy life style on a global level need to be seriously put forward.

The work of the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change is a positive initiative. While the shift to low carbon will emphasis the need to think in whole systems and not just producer categories (Milliband).

Individuals should be given incentives to make the correct decisions, while carbon trading system places the environmental problem onto the consumer, the firms need not be ignored. If prices perfectly reflect externalities and the optimal management of resources, then there would be lesser need for too much administrative control, since prices would be correct.

It should not turn out to be that under emissions trading, governments allocate permits to big industrial polluters so they can trade "rights to pollute" amongst themselves as the need arises. Such schemes should not allow us to sidestep the most fundamentally effective response to climate change that we can take, which is to invent efficient energy.

One complaint by business is that the financial pressure on them from their institutional shareholders affects their capability to innovate. The Guardian analysis found in all 10 sectors looked at - automobiles and parts, IT hardware, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, electronic and electrical, software and computer services, chemicals, aerospace and defence, engineering and machinery, telecommunications, and health – the UK cost of funds is among the highest in the developed world. Steve Radley of the EEF said that for bigger firms, with large turnovers, the cost of funds was not much of a deterrent to R&D spending, because they were not exposing themselves to much risk. “for medium sized firms, however, innovation exposes them to a high degree of risk and the cost of funds is an issue.” Profitability had been so squeezed in recent years that it was hard for companies to break out of the “vicious circle” and invest for the long term.

There need to be more incentive for businesses to move on the green direction. There is an urgent need for stricter regulation, oversight, and penalties for polluters on community, local, national and international levels, as well as support for communities adversely impacted by climate change. But currently such policies are nigh-on invisible, as they contradict the sacred cows of economic growth and the free market.

Undoubtedly, breaking this paralysis will require immense moral courage. For courage, leaders of today need only to look back in time a little and see what their predecessors did. For example, the hard-won ban against slavery deliberately went against what was considered economically justified.

On the positive side climate change is an opportunity for communities getting together and local authorities being thoughtful to tackle common environmental issues. New opportunities for innovation and creativity to seek green solutions arise from coping with climate change. It is everyone's issue - not by framing the issue purely in terms of pricing, trade and economic growth, we should not reduce the scope of the response to climate change to market-based solutions. Climate change has increased awareness on values that previously was ignored, since the problem is beyond economic damages. It is crucial not to ignore damages from unquantifiable variables such as human lives lost, and species extinction.


Sources:

www.oxfam.org.uk/climatechange

http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/biodiversity/branch.php

UKCIP Climate Digest: November 2006, http://www.ukcip.org.uk/news_releases/38.pdf

BBC online, Kevin Smith, Carbon Trade Watch, Transnational Institute, 9 November 2006

The Guardian, John Chapman, former secretary of the DTI’s innovation advisory board, Feb 3, 2006

http://environ-econ.blogspot.com/


Climate Change Already is Impossible


Saving the planet from climate change may already be impossible. That's because environmentalists have never spoken past the taboo which lies at the heart of the matter. It's not flying which should be curtailed, it's procreating. The Earth cannot sustain the number of people who live on it. With the fossil fuel based technologies for generating power we have, in order to prevent climate change through excessive CO2 emissions, more and more people would continually have to emit less and less CO2 each. Population control should have begun decades ago. The rate of procreation and the ability of modern medicine and agriculture to keep people alive has outstripped the deaths caused by war, old age, famine, and disease which kept the population in check. As a result, environmentalists have demanded a simplistic per capita ceiling on CO2 emissions starting in nations they define as "industrialized." This concept flies in the face of the fact that those who produce the highest per capita emissions also happen to be among the highest per capita producers of wealth and food and the greatest economic engine in the world on which all others directly or indirectly depend. The entire world's economy requires their output and consumption to sustain itself. A sudden reduction in their economy would have grave consequences globally, not marginally reducing the world's total economic output but severely impacting it. Environmentalists would avert a looming global ecological disaster by exchanging it for an immeditate global economic disaster whose consequences would be every bit as dire. This would include mass starvation, mass poverty, political and social upheavals, even wars. The most vulnerable populations would be those in the third world all over Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At that point the environmentalists would presumably wash their hands of the entire matter by saying it is a problem for economists and politicians to solve and outside of their area of expertise. The liklihood of this happening is virtually nil. The largest producer of CO2 and the most productive engine of wealth also happens to be by far the strongest military power and will not be persuaded to destroy its economy for the greater good either voluntarily nor is it possible to persuade it by force.

Had European environmentalists who seem most concerned been honest, they'd have also concentrated their efforts decades ago to replace the carbon based technologies with others having less or no environmental impact and urged other governments to undertake the same quest. Instead, they sat idly by while their own societies invested their technological capacities on useless ego boosting projects like a redundant super jumbo airplane, a redundant space program, and a pie in the sky project to harness thermonuclear fusions which is at least several decades away from success if it ever is made to work at all. Their self admittedly inadequate program, the Kyoto protocol has proven to be a complete flop. Beyond not persuading the largest producer of CO2 to agree to its inequitable reductions, those nations in Europe which did sign up to it will largely fail to meet their agreed to targets by a wide margin, having refused to take effective action for exactly the same reason the largest producer refused to agree, namely its adverse econimic impact. By limiting their definition of the problem to a purely environmental one and excluding all of its other aspects and ramifications, the environmentalists guaranteed that it would not be solved. Why did they do that? There are only two possible reasons I can think of. Either they are incompetent or their true goal was political, not ecological. Now along with their friends whose crusade has always been overtly purely political, they've managed to alienate and isolate the largest single force on earth. What do they do for an encore, where do they take us from here? Fly all you like...in the time you have left. With mad men in charge of government of Iran, a nation determined to build nuclear weapons to destroy those it defines as its enemies, our end may be much sooner than even global warming would have it.

Source: Nick Robisnson weblog: Mark wrote