Preparing for Climate Change: In an editorial, it argues that the U.S. government must start acting now if the United States is to successfully adapt to the challenge posed by inevitable changes in the global climate. It says that developing new agricultural practices in the United States is the best way it can help the world.
First, the report offers this warning: "As a result of human activity, the average temperature of Earth will soon leave the less-than-1 degree Celsius range that it has maintained for more than 10,000 years." The US climate "is no longer stable, but will continue to change in new and often surprising ways," it adds. It calls for deeper research into how specific regions will be affected and on ways to lessen or adapt to changes.
Though federal leadership will be "essential," the report does not recommend a central agency to deal with the effort. It suggests a need to support existing governments in adapting to climate change.
The president is right to want to cut emissions. The alternative, allowing climate change to take its course, would be far more damaging to America and the world. The economic impact of rising sea levels, reduced crop yields, fiercer storms and many other doleful consequences would be devastating.
But fighting climate change will be costly. It will involve swapping cheap but dirty fuels for cleaner but dearer ones, as Congress intends, as well as building lots of expensive new power plants to replace older, more polluting ones. That in turn will lead to higher electricity and fuel prices. Despite the president's airy talk of green jobs, cutting emissions, by almost all calculations, will increase costs for most businesses and families. Those extra costs must be kept to a minimum.
Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, argues that those who view global warming in entirely negative terms are neglecting the benefits that warmer weather could have on people's health around the globe. By viewing the problem in this way, the writer argues, governments can make sounder policy choices.
This was the message delivered to a conference in Copenhagen this week by Alistair Hunt, a researcher at Bath University. "I am trying to bring home the impact of climate change to everyone," he said.
It is true, as Hunt noted, that the 2003 heatwave claimed 2,000 lives in Britain; that human-caused warming will increase global temperatures by about 2.6 degrees Celsius on average; and that high temperatures cause heat strokes, heart attacks and other illnesses, which hit the elderly and chronically ill the hardest. But low temperatures also kill. The old, infirm, homeless and very young are at the highest risk of hypothermia, heart attacks, strokes and illnesses caused or exacerbated by the cold.
Winter regularly takes many more lives than any heatwave: 25,000 to 50,000 people each year die in Britain from excess cold.
