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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (100442)	2/14/2005 6:34:57 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793677

Prevention can be good but the cost has to be considered, as does the certainty of the harm you are trying to prevent. Even if we where certain that human activity is causing global warming and that it would cause sea levels to rise it probably would not be worth the effort of prevention if the cost was quadrillions of dollars (which is not just something I'm pulling out of thing air at least one estimate has the total dollar cost over a century as equaling well in to the quadrillion (or thousand trillion) range), and rise in temperatures and sea levels would happen slowly (over hundreds of years rather than over a couple of decades) than even with certainty it probably wouldn't be work the cost. All in all a good reason to consider adaptation rather then prevention. Also to the extent we consider prevention we should consider counteractive prevention (for example taking measures to increase growth of phytoplankton to use up CO2) rather than just reducing CO2 emissions (which is going to be very expensive). Any ideas about adapting? The obvious one is to not develop right up on the coasts but that would be hard to enact because a lot of people want to develop there. A better idea than trying to stop it might simply be to refuse to subsidize it. That would be hard enough politically, but would be a good idea for other reasons as well as the possibility of higher sea levels. Tim