Sorry, Climate Change Wouldn't Hurt America's Economy

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Thanks for the very succinct assessment of the report.
It's important that we not let the media think for us.
Sorry about all the skeptics...same ole' same ole'

TH of KY 8:07PM January 05, 2009

The simple truth is that "global warming" only becomes a problem when the rate of climate change becomes smaller than the applicable decision making cycle.
A wall of water coming at you is a far greater emergency than the 10cm/year sea level increase projected by IPCC's own numbers. The movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was dramatic because the storm changed the world's weather at a rate that no reputable scientist believes possible in real life. 30 walls of water, sudden mass extinctions, heat waves so sudden that lakes evaporate overnight, those simply aren't going to happen no matter what the doomsayers predict.
Instead what's most likely, if there's anything to AGW, is that the ariable growing belt would broaden and move slightly farther north of the equator than it is and a lot closer to the arctic regions. The sea levels, which have been rising steadily since the end of the last Ice Age, would rise fractionally faster and low-lying coastal regions will either be dyked or become uninhabitable a bit sooner than these would have otherwise. Polar bears would NOT die off but simply alter their hunting patterns to adapt to the changing climate, as would most other species. Plants and animals will die due to environmental pollution and habitation destruction whether it's hot or cold: If there are a hundred reasons to stop pumping poisons into the air from our factory smokestacks then global warming/climate change predictions is probably #14.
A hundred years from now our descendents will look back onand wonder what kind of mass hysteria/delusion gripped our minds to make us go unhinged over predictions of doom and death from "global warming".

Orion of CA 6:22PM January 05, 2009

Hasn't Glenn Reynolds copyrighted "Faster, please"? If not, he should.

Mister Snitch of NJ 5:31PM January 05, 2009

Nitrogen 78.0842%
Oxygen 20.9463%
Argon 0.9342%
Carbon dioxide 0.0384%
Other 0.0020%
Notice anything weird/stoo-pit about these percentages?????
global warming=sunspot activity in which we are in retrograde at this time=global cooling
water covers 71% of earth...ice accounts for 2.4% antarctica accounts for over 90% of WORLDWIDE ICE, which is why they always point to the north pole for melting evidence
don't let the ice in your drink melt or it will fall out the glass is the argument against the idiots saying the melting ice will raise the tides...stoo-pit
Makes you wonder about your expanding Argon footprint...

vinny of AZ 5:17PM January 05, 2009

"Climate Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century," by Melissa Dell and Benjamin Jones, is a very interesting, if ultimately inconclusive, paper. Unfortunately, your commentary on it missed or misrepresented its main point.
What the paper shows is that in the historical record for the second half of the twentieth century, hotter than (national) average temperatures were statistically correlated with slower growth in poor countries, but not in rich countries. No great surprise there, since poor countries are on average hotter and more agricultural than rich countries. The authors try various heroic extrapolations from this result, pointing out that it implies greater global damages from temperature change than most economic models assume. (This is an interesting new style of economic research in general, looking at historical climate fluctuations and their correlations with economic outcomes.)
What the paper DOESN’T tell us is that rich countries will be immune to the very different, and greater, climate stresses of the current century. As we move into a realm of higher temperatures, more extreme events, and more adverse changes in precipitation, the impacts of climate shocks will be qualitatively different from the historical record. E.g. James Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, now says that sustaining as much as 450 ppm of CO2 in the long run puts us on a path to an ice-free Earth with many meters of sea-level rise as everything melts, total disruption of freshwater systems based on mountain glaciers and snowpack, etc. You can’t anticipate the costs of that from the data in this paper. Of course, the costs will be greater for poor countries; that’s always true. But the rich world won’t be unscathed in the future, just because it was little harmed by late-twentieth century temperature fluctuations.
Dr. Frank Ackerman
Stockholm Environment Institute-US Center
Tufts University
Somerville, Massachusetts

Frank Ackerman of MA 3:23PM January 05, 2009

The Right is perceived to have all the oil money - although the Left always gets their greedy share from the barons and the Saudis. This perception enables the Left to create their own barons; the Green Barons. Green money for the Left is the counter to oil money for the Right. The only difference being that oil actually runs the world's economies, while "green" merely baffles them. Soros and Gore and the apparatchiks at the U.N. deserve prosecution, not praise, for hollering fire in the crowded theater. The papal dispensation that IS the utterly ridiculous carbon credit scheme is worse than anything Madoff ever conjured. At least Madoff restricted his nefarious malfeasance to various individual investors. Gore and Bono and that Virgin Atlantic idiot, Soros, Ban, Obama and an ever-widening idiot menagerie of dupes, fools, snake-oil salesmen, charlatans and dubious capitalists go beyond the individual investor. Or, should one say they want ONE individual investor – the Earth.

Che Guevara's Bullet Hole of GA 2:39PM January 05, 2009

Who talked about being scared? I personally do not live in fear of something I have little to no control over - but that doesn't mean I ignore it completely.
Ignoring this simply because its beyond your (and my own) realm of imagination is akin to sticking your head in the sand.

A Human 2:16PM January 05, 2009

Doesn't anyone notice the similarity between the Climate Change hysteria and the Y2K hysteria?

Paul A'Barge of TX 2:13PM January 05, 2009

"world devastation"... "the oceans would rise by no less than 50 metres."... "total collapse"...
Some people like to scare themselves.

No Chicken Little 2:02PM January 05, 2009

Wake up. Stop questioning what is a fact - global climate change is happening, and it is quickening.
From this article in a Canadian new paper: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/552439
the writer states: "If the eastern ice sheet were to disappear, the oceans would rise by no less than 50 metres."
Yes, currently the eastern ice shelf is stable but the concept of "current" these days is changing (for the worse) frequently. How long will it be until it becomes unstable - who knows, but when it does, the concept of "Low economic impact" is laughable - a 50 meter rise is going to wipe out a lot of cities in wealthy nations.

A Human 1:12PM January 05, 2009