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49 comments on How fast should you boil a frog?

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Don Sailorman on February 1, 2006 - 10:56am

Magnificent post!

As becomes clear from a close study of your prose, it is vital that we continue to understand that these models are thinking exercise--thought experiment and not predictions. What you have here is are marvelous warming up exercises, sort of like calisthenics before the main sporting event.

Of course there are anomalies. Of course the model is incomplete. All useful models are incomplete--no exceptions.

What you rightly emphasize over and over again is the huge margin of uncertainty; this cannot be overstressed. You have dodged the bullet of the fallacy of misplaced precision seen in some other (not to be mentioned) sources.

Now I do not know whether or not you would like to address this following question, but if you do not, I would appreciate it if you could suggest people I could query on the following topic:
Who are the probable big winners and big losers from global warming? I think Russia and Canada are obvious huge winners from a major warming of the world, the U.S. including Alaska is a pretty big winner, possibly much of Scandinavia is a big winner (if only we could figure out ocean currents and how and why they change), and Greenland, Iceland, and the U.K. seem likely to benefit eventually.

However, climate change may not be a positive sum game; it almost certainly is not zero sum, and the conventional wisdom is that it is a very negative sum game. And thus I return to my question: Are the current losers in the world (the tropical countries) going to become even bigger losers? Bangladesh disappears, and so do other low-lying locales in all probability. Goodbye, Florida. But what about mountainous countries such as Peru or Bolivia? What about the mountainous countries in Asia?

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odograph on February 1, 2006 - 11:14am

Google "regional climate change impacts" any you'll have more studies than you can shake a stick at.

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Don Sailorman on February 1, 2006 - 11:49am

Alas, a hundred Google pages is too much. Because some of the best stuff is not recent, it is hard to find except by the old-fashioned way of plowing through article after article to see which are the seminal papers that are most often cited. I am hoping for somebody to point me at roughly three of the best studies on this topic.

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odograph on February 1, 2006 - 12:04pm

After your bit about "uncertainty" in global climate models, you are asking for the "best" regional climate models?

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Don Sailorman on February 1, 2006 - 12:29pm

"Best" regional climate models are a good starting point, but I want to go beyond them to a broad and deep consideration of political, military, diplomatic, cultural and historical factors.

For example, I am guessing that Iceland will be a huge winner in large part because of the following: its exceedingly literate and well-educated population; its advantages in terms of geothermal and hydroelectric power; the fact that there is a lot of ocean around it that makes it hard to attack; the probability that there will continue to be a great many fish in the sea regardless of what happens, so long as liquid water remains in the Atlantic; its 1,000 year history of democracy; its survival during past hard times; its genetic advantages insofar as that 1,000 years ago it was an exceedingly violent society, and much of the DNA that was violence prone probably got eliminated; the fact that all Icelanders are related to one another and know their geneologies, often going back hundreds of years. In other words, they are all cousins of one another and worry about finding a cousin distant enough to marry so as to avoid the hazards of excessive inbreeding.

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westexas on February 1, 2006 - 11:21am

http://www.energybulletin.net/12179.html

Cloudy with a chance of chaos
Eugene Linden, Fortune
<<Climate change may bring more violent weather swings -- and sooner -- than experts had thought. ("the most apocalyptic thing I've ever seen in a U.S. business publication")<br> first published January 19, 2006>>.

The captioned article addresses some of the economic impacts of rapid climate change here in the US. For starters, property owners are going to have--and are having--increasing difficulties in getting property insurance, especially within a few hundred miles of coastlines, from Southern Texas to the Northeast US. After reading this article, I concluded that I'm not sure that I want to own property anywhere in the US.

In regard to Scandinavia and Northern Europe, don't forget Stuart's previous post on the possible (probable ongoing?) slowing of global ocean currents. In early 2004, Fortune published an article suggesting that a slowing of the ocean currents would cause (among other things): (1) very cold winters in Northern Europe; (2) more active hurricane seasons and (3) droughts and higher winds in the Southern US. Today, we are seeing all three things happening.

The Gulf Stream delivers something like 27,000 times as much energy to the UK as all of the power plants put together. As I'm sure you know, the UK and Northern Europe at about the same latitude as Siberia. Perversely enough, we could see colder winters in northern climates and hotter summers in southern climates (in the Northern Hemisphere), with more widespread droughts.

The 2004 Fortune article suggested that the US may be the best place (perhaps as a renter, not a property owner) to ride out rapid climate change (which is richly ironic since we have arguably been the biggest contributor to global warming).

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Leanan on February 1, 2006 - 11:24am

I don't think it's possible to answer this question. Certainly, some of the losers are already evident - like Tuvalu and Kiribati. But people living in mountainous regions may also be losers. Millions of Bolivians depend on glacier melt for water and power - and the glaciers may be completely gone in 10 years.

This article is about the drought that's plagued the western U.S. for the past few years. It's affecting all kinds of things: farmers, towns that depend on fishing and boating, coal shipments (water's too low for barges), drinking water, hydroelectric plants, nuclear plants (they need water, too), livestock and wildlife, etc.

The cause? Not enough snow.

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Don Sailorman on February 1, 2006 - 12:39pm

Thanks for the article. A six year drought may be mere "noise," however. For example, in the Calif. Sierra mountains not greatly distant from Montana, precip has been above normal for at least the past three years.

Perhaps what the data are telling us is that rather than trying to predict the future climate, we should prepare for major changes--without trying to specify what these changes are. I'm writing a series of science-fiction novels based on the premise that climate abruptly flips back to the Cretaceous during the second decade of this century--partly because I don't know of anybody who has seriously proposed that scenario.

Often it is what we do not worry about that gets us.

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Leanan on February 1, 2006 - 12:54pm

Agree that the current "500 year drought" might be natural variation, rather than global warming.

However, it's consistent with global warming. This study links past global warming with drought in the U.S. west. IOW, even if this drought isn't caused by global warming, it's what we can expect in the future if the world keeps warming.

I'm sure parts of the world will get wetter. The heavy rains in California are probably linked to the drought in the west. Too much water can be as much of a problem as not enough, though, as those people whose houses slid off the hillside discovered.

Perhaps what the data are telling us is that rather than trying to predict the future climate, we should prepare for major changes--without trying to specify what these changes are.

Definitely. One reason not to put it all in real estate, IMO. Your beautiful, fertile farm may end up dry as Death Valley...or underwater.

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