An interesting take on the issue from warmist Will Boisvert, Progress and Peril, h/t to The GWPF
How bad will climate change be? Not very.
No, this isn’t a denialist screed. Human greenhouse emissions will warm the planet, raise the seas and derange the weather, and the resulting heat, flood and drought will be cataclysmic.
Cataclysmic — but not apocalyptic. While the climate upheaval will be large, the consequences for human well-being will be small. Looked at in the broader context of economic development, climate change will barely slow our progress in the effort to raise living standards.
To see why, consider a 2016 Newsweek headline that announced “Climate change could cause half a million deaths in 2050 due to reduced food availability.” The story described a Lancet study, “Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change,” [1] that made dire forecasts: by 2050 the effects of climate change on agriculture will shrink the amount of food people eat, especially fruits and vegetables, enough to cause 529,000 deaths each year from malnutrition and related diseases. The report added grim specifics to the familiar picture of a world made hot, hungry, and barren by the coming greenhouse apocalypse.
But buried beneath the gloomy headlines was a curious detail: the study also predicts that in 2050 the world will be better fed than ever before. The “reduced food availability” is only relative to a 2050 baseline when food will be more abundant than now thanks to advances in agricultural productivity that will dwarf the effects of climate change. Those advances on their own will raise per-capita food availability to 3,107 kilocalories per day; climate change could shave that to 3,008 kilocalories, but that’s still substantially higher than the benchmarked 2010 level of 2,817 kilocalories—and for a much larger global population. Per-capita fruit and vegetable consumption, the study estimated, will rise by 6.1 percent and meat consumption by 5.4 percent. The poorest countries will benefit most, with food availability rising 14 percent in Africa and Southeast Asia. Even after subtracting the 529,000 lives theoretically lost to climate change, the study estimates that improved diets will save a net 1,348,000 lives per year in 2050.
A headline like “Despite climate change, rising food production will save millions of lives” isn’t great click-bait, but it would give a truer picture of a future under global warming as envisioned in the Lancet study. That picture is typical of the scientific literature on the impacts of climate change on human welfare. Global warming won’t wipe us out or even stall our progress, it will just marginally slow ordinary economic development that will still outpace the negative effects of warming and make life steadily better in the future, under every climate scenario. What the doomsday prognostications of drought and flood, heat-stroke and famine, migration and war miss is that climate change is not the only thing going on in the world, or even the most important thing.
It’s not even a new thing. Throughout history humans not only weathered climate crises but deliberately flung ourselves into them as we migrated away from our African homeland into deserts, mountains, floodplains and taiga. Global warming pales beside the climatic challenge surmounted by the Inuit when they settled the Arctic with igloos and kayaks, revolutionary technologies that improved their ability to travel and hunt. Theirs is just one example of the human capacity for finding better ways to get food, shelter, energy and resources from the hostile environments we embrace. “Adaptation” is not quite the right word for that process, which is so ubiquitous—and so fundamental to progress—that it is the essence of development.
This latest episode in humanity’s ongoing conquest of extreme climates will likewise amount to just another problem in economic and technological development, and a middling-scale one at that. Although clean energy will play a significant role by slowing and perhaps moderating global warming (as well as reducing pollution and easing resource constraints), contrary to the decarbonize-or-die doomsayers our main response to climate change will be other kinds of development that make climate change irrelevant. We will grow more food, harness more water, cool ourselves more vigorously, move to new lands and build—and-rebuild—new cities. We will exploit technological breakthroughs, but mostly we will improve familiar technologies and deploy them more widely. We will do all this not because of global warming but because of more pressing challenges like population growth and the demand for higher living standards. The means by which we will overcome specific problems posed by climate change look less like the pristine “sustainable development” envisioned by greens and more like the ordinary development that has always sustained us.
You mean to tell me weather will continue to happen and be extreme at times? Oh please, tax me to make it better. And take away my freedoms too. Thanks!
The model is statistically significant to 0.5 calories in 2050. /sarc
The model is more significant for its creators at generating a published paper for the volume-based publication mill. Their subsequent wealth gain will contribute to increased carbon-intensive travel and consumption. It will be like the butterfly effect……… by 2050.
Have you ever noticed that the more specific the alarmists are about exactly what we are supposed to be worried about, and what the effects will be, and how this will impact human society, the more incredibly inane they become, and the more obviously it becomes they are just making stuff up?
To be an alarmist or even a run of the mill warmista, it is necessary to have the most abjectly dopey tunnel vision imaginable.
Hi Kip!
I’m afraid your “must read” left me, too, rather unimpressed by his arguments.. I read the original.
Boisvert apparently believes third-world development is imminent and best if on the same lines as that of the West. It doesn’t seem like he has a clear (or even vague) idea of the issues facing the developing world. Who will pay for all this development?
Nor does the potential hardship and loss of life due to climate change faze Boisvert. Because model-projected increases in food production save lives, more than half a million lives lost due to climate change are immaterial?
One interesting aspect of this research is that they forecast 1,877,000 lives would be saved through the middile-of-the-road developmental model, but 2,712,000 through the sustainable development one, but he never advocates for sustainability.. (In that scenario 590,000 lives would be lost to global warming.) So why isn’t he pushing a sustainable development model? (I don’t give a lot of weight to this model, anyway. Too many assumptions.)
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Desalinization.
1.2% of CA’s GDP is an acceptable cost for water??? But my take is that 58 cents/cL is the cost of the desalinization process itself. Building the plants and pumping ocean water to the agricultural areas of California would take an immense investment in energy and infrastructure. And what about non-coastal states – giant pipes for water? Why are these costs more acceptable than mitigation of climate change?
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Food
Didn’t he start with an article saying half a million people were going to die for diet-related reasons due to climate change? (I wonder if this considers the potential effects on the ocean food web, from which billions benefit)
” The technology is banal: machinery that can harvest fields quickly when destructive weather threatens; plastic bags and metal silos to keep insects out of grain; roads and trucks to take produce quickly to market, plastic crates to keep it from getting crushed en route, refrigerated warehouses to keep it fresh and canneries to preserve it. [20]
“Global warming won’t crimp the world’s food supply much and decarbonization won’t safeguard it. Preserving and expanding the food supply to meet rising demand will rely on hum-drum investment in growing and processing food—doing what we do now, only more and better. Unfortunately, misplaced environmental priorities may undermine that program by demonizing important technologies like GMOs and championing organic farming and other low-input, low-yield models as replacements for industrial agriculture. To feed the world we will have to question that vision of sustainability.”
He makes the same mistake again and again. Where are the residents of developing countries going to get the capital for all this? Farming equipment isn’t even a “hum-drum” investment for American farmers, one reason small farms can’t compete. One major problem with GMO seeds is that it is often patented, so every year new seed has to be purchased. There are geographic, social, environmental, political and economic considerations he ignores.
It’s is not “misplaced environmental priorities” that makes people resist forcing the American model of agriculture on the third world, it’s also what is possible, desirable and sustainable, as well as recognizing the sovereignty of other nations.
The Green Fund has over 40 adaptation projects planned to help people in developing nations.. We are now the One and Only country in the whole world that did not sign the Paris aagreement. We’ve already given a billion. It would have cost less that $6 a person for the rest of our pledge, and we could have signed. It’s shameful to be standing alone in our selfish unwillingness to take responsibility, and instead watch the rest of the world carry the burden when we have contributed more CO2 to the atmosphere than any other nation. It’s not about socialism, that’s a straw man; it’s a political and ethical question. A country that isn’t involved productively in global issues cannot be a leader of nations. .
..Then this guy says climate warming will be fine because people can use AIR CONDITIONING? Really? This is the answer to places becoming uninhabitable? A/C? Wearing a bubble to go outside? Has he no idea how much energy it takes to run A/C? Who will pay for it? Where will it come from? This is by far the most absurd idea I’ve come across in a while.
Sea Level
In short: disastrous, catastrophic, will necessitate the displacement of hundreds of millions, but really no big deal because people are already dealing with disaster, war and displacement, and technology will be there to fix the problems for those who can afford it. IOW, the rich will be fine so who cares if countless poor will die? That’s modernity!
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Boisvert apparently has little concept of the problems facing the developing world and completely leaves the natural world out of the picture. That’s not just an environmentalist issue, it’s also an economic and social one, and it’s consistently ignored. People think superficial measures of human well-being are all that will affect us. Few models take into account things like expansion of pest and weed ranges, the relative competitive responses of weeds vs. crops in high co2 regimes, how high co2 might affect oceanic algal blooms, what early budding might mean for forest water regimes, how longer growing seasons could enable more generations of insect disease vectors per season… Of course, there are benefits, too, and simplification is bound to happen.