Getting warmer on climate change

ARTICLE: “The Warming of Greenland: Arctic melting accelerates, revealing uncharted islands and threatening to raise sea levels all over the world,” by John Collins Rudolf, New York Times, 16 January 2007, p. D1.

OP-ED: “A warmer world is ripe for conflict and danger,” by David Cameron, Financial Times, 24 January 2007, p. 11.

WORLD IN 2007: “Scientific argument settled: All that is left is the collection action problem in which no one wants to be at a disadvantage,” by Fiona Harvey, Financial Times, 24 January 2007, p. 8.

A lot of colleagues want me to start talking up global warming in my strategic vision, and while I’m attracted to it as an “inevitability,” I will confess that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the strategic imperatives its emergence portends.

I find myself haunted by Bjorn Lomborg’s argument that while the 20th century saw ocean levels rise somewhere north of 6 inches, it wasn’t exactly the predominant geopolitical agenda driver of that era, so why should a predicted rise of somewhere just north of a foot this century become the great driver of global change?

Yes, I understand that many scientists lean toward the more high-end estimates of 3 feet, and I get the “feedback mechanisms” arguments from Gore that say an inflection point may be near, linked largely to major ice melting around the planet that’s rapidly increasing.

But even when I get the scary computer animation on places going underwater, I find myself wondering if preventing that sort of change is very realistic. If it’s not, then I wonder about the opportunity costs associated with trying. Humans have a tendency to go wild with these sorts of corrections, creating more trouble than they’re worth. Plus, we often tackle the most fantastic tasks while bypassing the more reasonable ones.

Case in point: the FT article shows a map displaying WHO estimates of deaths caused by climate change in 2000. Now, first off, blaming all this on the singular causality of climate change is a bit much, but let’s look at where the WHO logs all these extra deaths (about 35m): there are overwhelming centered in the Gap and in the interior poor regions of New Core pillars like China.

Now, since the deaths recorded are diarrheal diseases, malaria, malnutrition, cardiovascular, HIV/AIDS and cancer, my first instinct is to say, let’s work on the health habits and medical systems of these countries, because global warming or not, the vast majority of these deaths are prevented or delayed most easily by that path than by alternative strategies that may limit much needed growth for these populations. I mean, I gotta argue that poverty kills more around the world than global warming does--hands down.

As you all know, I make consistent argument that tackling instability and violence inside the Gap is a key prerequisite for setting in motion economic development in the bulk of these developing states, so if I bought into the tie that global warming will lead to violence, then the circle would be squared and I’d hop on the bandwagon.

Problem is, I don’t find those arguments convincing. The “resource wars” literature is just so weak on logic and so amazingly bereft on historical data. The proponents mostly gin up scary scenarios, and then suppose violence must result from resource shortages (thus everyone’s going to war with everyone to get oil, water, food, etc.) When the history of mankind is very clear on this subject: growing interdependencies create the impetus for shared solutions, not zero-sum fights, whether they’re interdependencies of abundance or scarcity. In fact, scarcity fuels deal making even more than abundance--just like in trade in general.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that a rapid up tick in global sea levels would trigger some serious humanitarian crises (Bangladesh comes to mind), and if of sufficient magnitude we could be talking serious System Perturbations that segue into serious global rule-set change.

But until we get more outcomes instead of just more data, global warming remains a background issue for the world: something we work slowly over time, incrementally changing behavior.

So, on this score, I guess I stand uncorrected until the system gets bonked on the head in some way as to supercede current agendas, which in both the Core and Gap, are jam-packed with difficult issues that involve plenty of death and can be tackled at better cost-benefit ratios that are more easily understood by leaders and the led alike. There simply is no differentiating play--for now--that creates clear winners and losers. So long as it’s perceived that we’re all losing in a roughly equal fashion, leadership simply will not emerge politically, even as it does so inevitably in the business realm.

Comments

[Alex]

Lomborg is unserious precisely because he waffles on about sea-level rise. What matters about climate change is agriculture, disease, and water supply.

[Mark in Texas]

If you honestly believe that global warming is caused by human beings putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then the solution is going to be finding sinks to remove that carbon dioxide because the Chinese are not going to cripple their economy by slowing down their use of coal and petroleum.

If everybody in the United States lined up and drank a Kool Aid and cyanide cocktail, the decrease in US carbon dioxide production would be dwarfed by the increase from China in a couple of years.