Averting Climate Change

Robert Pindyck has a new book, Climate Future: Averting and Adapting to Climate Change, and he appeared on EconTalk to discuss his findings.  He admits out the gate that the situation is uncertain, and we cannot know what the future holds.  Perhaps carbon pollution will lead to catastrophe or maybe it will have little noticeable impact.  However, he likened the situation to having insurance.  You don't know if your house will burn down, so it is a good idea to have insurance just in case.  Good point, but that doesn't quite work.  If the worst does happen, what will my insurance money buy me?  Nothing.  The government will - in the best circumstance - spend it to mitigate climate change.  More likely, it will spend it on pet projects that have nothing to do with climate change.  Though I am highly skeptical of the climate change issue, it is certainly reasonable to take some actions.  It was proposed that the government stop subsidizing people to build houses on the beach or in flood plains.  Proposing a carbon tax to decrease the use of fossil fuels is a classic proposal, but it will have little impact unless China, India, and other parts of the developing world agree.  Not going to happen.  To show how urgent the situation is, Pindyck noted that it will be 30 to 40 years before the current CO2 emissions have their full impact on the global temperature.  Stop all CO2 tomorrow and the future is still bleak.  Great.  With that in mind, adaptations were suggested.  Russ was more willing to consider adapting to change, while Pindyck was eager to enact his carbon tax.  I did like the mention that an electric car is often a coal-powered car under our current method of power generation.  In the end, there are no easy answers, though we should take precautions.  I'll agree with that.

My big issue with the climate change debate is that the earth has been much warmer, so warm that the poles had no ice.  That was millions of years ago.  A thousand years ago, it was warmer than today, which is why the Vikings thought it would be a good idea to colonize Greenland.  This was the Medieval Warm Period.  I've never heard a climate scientist explain this based on the current modeling.  The earth today is in an interglacial period of an ongoing ice age.  Yes, this is an interglacial period of the current ice age, the Quaternary glaciation.