Evidence of an Externality

When worldchanging visited the future salon, I challenged them, fairly strongly. Quite honestly, I didn't think they presented any evidence that action was needed (more precisely, I thought they presented problems that were already being solved by market forces. And that they, themselves, were documenting the solutions, rather than describing things that needed government action). And when I asked why they thought action was necessary, they fell back on externalities, and they fell back on global warming.

The problem with global warming is that the evidence for it is tenuous at best. And the causal linkage, from "the globe is warming" to "it's our fault" is even weaker.

On the other hand, the biosphere in England is rapidly losing its diversity. The study is a bit scary-- it's very hard to read quotes like the following and not think "Oh Shit."

The study involved about 20,000 naturalists who inspected the entire British landscape to compile three atlases of native birds, butterflies and wild plants. The information they gathered on the presence or absence of more than 1,500 species in each 10-kilometre (six-mile) square of countryside they surveyed was compared directly with similar atlases compiled 20 or 40 years previously.

In the relatively short period between the past and present surveys, the scientists found a dramatic decline of all three major groups of wildlife, with one-third of all species studied disappearing from at least one part of the UK they had occupied 20 or 40 years ago. Jeremy Thomas, the leader of the study from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Dorset, said the decline in butterflies was much worse than expected and far worse than that of birds or plants. "The results are appalling," he said. "In Britain 71 per cent of all butterfly species have declined in the last 20 years.

And, the leading cause of this is clearly human beings (loss of habitat and changes in the way the woodlands were managed).

Is the future a world without butterflies?

Comments

[Paul Baclace]

The discussion last month inspired me to find out more about the global warming issue.

After reading the testimony of Richard Lindzen before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee (May 1, 2001) at:

http://www.john-daly.com/TAR2000/lindzen.htm

the IPCC Summary report smells pretty bad. Lindzen was one of the authors of the original scientific study on which the Summary is supposedly based. He and several other scientists involved with the study have protested how the IPCC Summary abused the underlying study to political ends by overstating the reliability of computational models and understating the unknowns involved.

(Note that Lindzen agrees that average temperatures have changed in the last 20 years, but why they have changed has not been established. Lindzen also points out that the computational models do not even correctly predict the past.)

In the mainstream press, the high and low range of shakey warming predictions are usually simplified to stating the high values as certainties.

It is generally agreed that the Kyoto protocol would eventually involve trading of the right to add carbon to the atmosphere. This would likely lead to having the developed countries pay the developing countries to use cleaner technology. The possibility of this transfer of money is sufficient to greatly bias the discussion.

Multi-trillion dollar decisions need a better basis than this.

The question of humankind's global impact on the planet is not going to go away, but it also must be recognized that the global climate has changed dramatically in the past without any help from humankind. All of this calls for much more longterm study without a specfic conclusion in mind.