Global warming is best viewed a la that Danish chap Lomborg: he was writing about the human condition, not the environment. He just misnamed his book. I'm pretty sure that humans are one of the species that will fare the best under global warming, at least of the larger mammals. But plenty of other things won't, and many people, especially those bashing global warming science today, could care less.
I would agree - but you've just put yourself absolutely on the opposite side of what Al Gore, supporters of the Kyoto treaty, and every MSM reporter tell us daily, i.e. that the world will end unless we support Kyoto right now, unprecedented catastrophe, etc. and so forth. From wikipedia's article on Lomborg:
However, his most contentious assertion involves global warming. From the outset, Lomborg "accepts the reality of man-made global warming" though he refers to a number of uncertainties in the computer simulations of global warming and some aspects of data collection. Lomborg's main contention involves not the science of global warming but the politics and the policy response to such scientific findings. He points out that, given the amount of greenhouse gas reduction required to combat global warming, the current Kyoto protocol is grossly insufficient. He goes on to argue that the economic cost of the restrictions which have to be put in place to actually reverse or even slow down global warming is impractically high compared to the alternative of coordinating the international communities to adjust to global warming. Moreover, he asserts that the cost of combating global warming would be disproportionately shouldered by poor developing countries. Since the policy combating global warming places unrealistic limits on economic activities, the countries that suffer from pollution and poverty due to the state of their economies will be condemned to continue in such a state. He proposes that the importance of global warming in terms of policy priority may be low compared to other policy issues such as fighting poverty and disease and aiding poor countries, which has direct and more immediate impact both in terms of welfare and the environment. He therefore asks for a global cost-benefit analysis to be made before deciding on the best measures to take. The Copenhagen Consensus that Lomborg later organized led to the conclusion that combating global warming does have a benefit but its priority compared to other issues is "poor" (ranked 13th) and three projects addressing climate change (optimal carbon tax, the Kyoto protocol and value-at-risk carbon tax), are the least cost-efficient of the proposals.
About your speculation of what cutting co2 emissions would cost, I saw some MIT professors musing a while back that if atmospheric co2 turned out to be real problem, it could be most efficiently handled by sucking the atmosphere through giant filters designed to remove and capture the co2. My own cynical suspicion is that since such a solution would not succeed in crippling the major capitalist econonies, it would never be of interest to the the current global warming crowd even if were proven to be fast, efficient and cheap. |
