Imagine that over the next 70 or 80 years, a giant port city — say, Tokyo — found itself engulfed by sea levels rising as much as 4.5m or more. Millions of inhabitants would be imperiled, along with trillions of US dollars worth of infrastructure.
This awful prospect is exactly the sort of thing global-warming evangelists like Al Gore have in mind when they warn that we must take “large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”
The rhetoric may sound extreme, but with so much hanging in the balance, surely it is justified. Without a vast, highly coordinated global effort, how could we possibly cope with sea-level rises on that order of magnitude?
Well, we already have. In fact, we are doing it right now. Since 1930, excessive groundwater withdrawal has caused Tokyo to subside by as much as 4.5m, with some of the lowest parts of the downtown area dropping almost one-third of a meter per year in some years. Similar subsidence has occurred over the past century in a wide range of cities, including Tianjin, Shanghai, Osaka, Bangkok and Jakarta. In each case, the city has managed to protect itself from such large sea-level rises and thrive.
hyperbole
The point is not that we can or should ignore global warming. The point is that we should be wary of hyperbolic predictions. More often than not, what sound like horrific changes in climate and geography actually turn out to be manageable — and in some cases even benign.
Consider, for example, the findings of climate scientists Robert Nicholls, Richard Tol and Athanasios Vafeidis. In research funded by the EU, they studied what the global economic impact would be if global warming were to result in a collapse of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet. An event of this magnitude would likely cause the oceans to rise by perhaps 6m over the next 100 years — precisely the sort of thing that environmental activists have in mind when they warn about potential end-of-the-world calamities. However, would it really be all that calamitous?
Nicholls, Tol and Vafeidis say no. Here are the facts. A 6m rise in sea levels (which, not incidentally, is about 10 times more than the UN climate panel’s worst-case expectations) would inundate about 41,400km2 of coastline, where more than 400 million people currently live. That is a lot of people, to be sure, but hardly all of mankind. In fact, it amounts to less than 6 percent of the world’s population — which is to say that 94 percent of the population would not be inundated — and most of those who do live in the flood areas would never even get their feet wet.
That is because the vast majority of those 400 million people reside within cities, where they could be protected relatively easily, as in Tokyo. As a result, only about 15 million people would have to be relocated, and that is over the course of a century. In all, Nicholls, Tol, and Vafeidis say the total cost of managing this “catastrophe” — if politicians do not dither and pursue smart, coordinated policies — would be about US$600 billion a year, or less than 1 percent of global GDP.
This figure may seem surprisingly low, but that is only because so many of us have accepted the widespread view that we lack the capacity to adapt to large rises in sea levels. Not only do we have this capacity, but we have demonstrated it many times in the past.
Like it or not, global warming is real, it is man-made and we need to do something about it, but we are not facing the end of the world.
Climate science is a subtle and fiendishly convoluted discipline that rarely yields unambiguous forecasts or straightforward prescriptions. After 20 years of much talk but precious little action on global warming, a certain amount of frustration is to be expected. There is an understandable desire to want to cut through the verbiage and shake people by the shoulders.
frustration
Unfortunately, trying to scare the socks off of people does not help matters. Yes, a startling statistic, combined with some hyperbolic prose, will make us sit up and pay attention. However, we quickly become desensitized, requiring ever more outrageous scenarios to move us. As the scare stories become more inflated, so too does the likelihood that they will be exposed for the exaggerations that they are — and the public will end up tuning the whole thing out.
This may explain recent polling data showing that public concern about global warming has declined precipitously in the last three years. In the US, for example, the Pew Institute reported that the number of Americans who regard global warming as a very serious problem had declined from 44 percent in April 2008 to only 35 percent in October last year. More recently, a BBC study found that only 26 percent of Britons believe that man-made “climate change is happening,” down from 41 percent in November last year. In Germany, Der Spiegel magazine reported survey results showing that only 42 perecent feared global warming, compared with 62 percent in 2006.
Fear may be a great motivator in the short term, but it is a terrible basis for making smart decisions about a complicated problem that demands our full intelligence for a long period.
Bjorn Lomborg is head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School. Copyright: Project Syndicate
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