Changing Climate Report of the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee (1983) / Chapter Skim
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CLIMATIC CHANGE: IMPLICATIONS FOR WELFARE AND POLICY
CLIMATIC CHANGE: IMPLICATIONS FOR WELFARE AND POLICY
Pages 449-497
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From page 449... ...
The research has been motivated by concern that atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing and may increase faster as the use of fossil fuels continues to grow and by the known potential for a "greenhouse effect" that could generate worldwide changes in climate. The group responsible for the report is the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee; the study was authorized by an act of Congress concerned with carbon-intensive fuels; and the agency principally charged with managing the research is the Department of Energy.
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From page 450... ...
Until we reach the welfare and policy implications, research on atmospheric carbon dioxide generates its own agenda: sources of emissions, projected uses of fuels and patterns of land use, sources and sinks in the carbon cycle, radiative balance of the atmosphere and interchange of heat between oceans and air, changes in atmospheric temperature and induced changes in wind and precipitation, feedback through water vapor and reflecting ice, and the direct effect of carbon dioxide on photosynthesis. Which among the uncertainties are likely to yield to further research, on what time schedule, and how to deploy research resources are questions that have to be answered through a systems approach; but the main features of the system and its inputs are generated by a process that is mostly straightforward, even if not all of the relevant inputs can be anticipated before the research gets under way.
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From page 451... ...
This overlaps the uncertainties just mentioned: per capita income, for example, both influences the use of fossil fuels and affects how readily the world's population can afford, or can adapt to, changes in climate. Similarly, the structures people inhabit, the ways people and goods are transported, the foods people eat, the ways countries defend themselves, and the geographical distributions of populations within and among countries all affect land use and the kinds and amounts of energy used and hence the production of CO2; but they also affect the ways that climate impinges in living and earning, even on what climates are preferred.
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From page 452... ...
Even then, what remains is a somewhat arbitrary intermediate variable with no direct climatic interpretation. Even if temperature change were all we really wanted to know in the different regions and localities, the global mean temperature is little help unless each of us knows how to extract from it the atmospheric temperatures at geographical locations of interest.
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From page 453... ...
How will people be living and working and moving and raising families and entertaining themselves in Peking or New York or on the plains of Kansas or Patagonia, in the Nile Valley, southern England, or northern India? A mistake hard to avoid is superimposing a climate change that would occur gradually in the distant future on life as we know it today -- today's habitations and transport, today's agriculture and construction and fishing, today's urban complexes, today's working hours and living standards, diet and warmth, indoor and outdoor activity.
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From page 454... ...
But unless we impute to ourselves foresight much superior to what we might willingly claim for ourselves were we doing our work in l900, it is likely that most of the identifiable changes in welfare due to climate change would be, for most parts of the world, swamped by other uncertainties. Even whether, on behalf of the world, we would prefer the mean global atmospheric temperature to rise by a couple of degrees over the next hundred years, or to fall by that amount, or to stay as it is, would depend on considerations other than assessments of what the specific changes in local and regional climate would do to life and welfare in the affected populations.*
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From page 455... ...
It is wise to be concerned about any prospective change in some major index of climate, like the mean annual global atmospheric temperature, that goes beyond the boundary of values believed to have been experienced throughout the history of civilization. Certainly the temperate parts of Europe and North America would find bleak the prospect of a global cooling by two or three degrees, if the experience of the reported "Little Ice Age" of a few centuries ago is any guide.
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From page 456... ...
For the United States as a whole, slightly over half of the population has spent its life to date in the same state; the fraction who will spend, or have spent, an entire lifetime in the same state is much smaller. Climate variation even within the humid subtropical region, which had 32% of the population in l860 and again in l980 (but 29% in l920)
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From page 457... ...
Governments will assess consequences and choose policies according to the climatic impacts on their own populations and territory. At the same time, some national governments, including ours, need a framework for assessing consequences worldwide and policy options that are international in scope.
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From page 458... ...
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From page 459... ...
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From page 463... ...
. This is taken as starting point not to prejudice the question whether fuel and energy policies are the preferred policies for anticipating climate change but because this is the most familiar category, the one that occurs first and most naturally to people concerned with CO2 and climate change and the category least likely to be challenged as inappropriate, irrelevant, or improper.
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From page 464... ...
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From page 465... ...
Migration and relative growth expected in the normal course of events could aggravate or mitigate the damages due to climate changes and enhance or negate the benefits. If the main effects of climate change will be on agriculture, background variables must include population and income, land use and agricultural productivity, dietary practices, and other determinants of whether decrements in food output due to climate change would be expensive to make up or to do without, at the income levels at that time.
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From page 466... ...
Among the fossil fuels gas produces the least and coal the most CO2 per unit of heat (oil about 0.8 and gas 0.6 times the carbon of coal)
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From page 467... ...
An alternative would be to grow trees for harvest and preserve them from decay. If reforestation is the reverse of deforestation, "refossilization" of harvested forest would be the reverse of fossil fuel combustion.
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From page 468... ...
468 A few pertinent considerations. Preserving trees on site (coating them in plastic?
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From page 469... ...
Systematic suppression would create a significant change in regional climate. One more illustration that climate and weather modification are not an empty or uninteresting category is the possibility that the floating arctic ice cap could be made to disappear during part of the summer by depositing some substance, like soot, that would absorb the sun's *
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From page 470... ...
It is characteristic of the "CO2 problem" that though it may be in the interest of the world economy to restrict, at some cost, the use of fossil fuels, it is probably not in the interest of any single nation to incur on its own the cost of any reduction in global CO2. Whether any of the climate and weather modifications that might be undertaken, aside from suppression of CQ^, would be unilaterally attractive to individual nations, is more problematic.
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From page 471... ...
Migration, for example, can be motivated by changing climate; but migration within and between countries may still be responding a hundred years from now, as it is now, to political conditions and economic opportunities, and changing climate would be only one element in the politics or the economics. If we think how life has changed in our own country in 75 years during which the population changed from rural and small town to urban -- real income per capita doubled three times, the population 65 and older increased from 4 to l2%, and life expectancy at birth grew from 50 to 75 years -- and suppose that comparably dramatic changes may occur at the same rate in the future (although not necessarily along the same dimensions)
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From page 472... ...
It is concluded in Chapter 8 that any disappearance of the West Antarctic ice sheet would take centuries rather than decades and would be progressive rather than sudden. There are three principal ways that human populations can adapt to a rising sea level.
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From page 473... ...
473 recently recognized. (Actual defenses against high seawater are extremely localized in the United States.)
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From page 474... ...
The most severe dangers appear to be in areas, like Bangladesh, where dense populations dependent on agriculture occupy low coastal plains already subject to freshwater or seawater flooding. 9.2.l0 Food and Agriculture The only readily identified potential impact of significant magnitude on future living standards is on agriculture.
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From page 475... ...
A fair guess seems to be that any likely rate of change of climate due to C02 over the coming century would reduce per capita global Gross National Product by a few percentage points below what it would otherwise be. If global economic production were to stagnate and population to grow, so that food production became an even greater portion of world output, and so that large parts of the world's population continued poor and largely dependent on the production of food for their own livelihoods, the projected climate changes could be exceedingly bad news.
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From page 476... ...
This estimate, that temperature itself will matter little in overall energy use, is therefore a first approximation that can be straightforwardly arrived at by imagining summer and winter thermostat changes equivalent to the forecast change in ground-level atmospheric temperature in different regions or latitudes. Degree days of heating and cooling yield a result that is not an impressive fraction of the current cost of heating and cooling.
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From page 477... ...
If instead the CO2 accumulation gradually changes climates but there is no internationally organized regime of fossil fuel restriction, compensation would be less like "categorical aid" and more like general welfare or income support -- always subject, of course, to international political divisions and disputes. Table 9.3 summarizes possible background changes and societal response strategies to climate change.
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From page 478... ...
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From page 479... ...
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From page 480... ...
In the interim, the impact of rising fuel prices on fuel consumption has become more visible, and fuel prices have doubled again; current projections for fossil fuels are commonly closer to 2% growth. At that more moderate rate the accumulated atmospheric carbon at the end of another l00 years would still be at least double the current quantity, but far less than the several thousand gigatons of the earlier projection.
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From page 481... ...
And even that trade-off is certain to look unpersuasive to consumers paying current fuel prices. Some global rationing scheme that enjoyed the participation of the major producers and consumers of fossil fuels would be required if there were to be severe action at the national level.
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From page 482... ...
If the developed countries were prepared to make substantial economic sacrifices now to help to provide a more benign climate for Bangladesh a hundred years from now, anyone responsible for Bangladesh would probably prefer to have those economic sacrifices take the form of more immediate economic contributions to the country's standard of living and economic growth. Specifically, if a global tax on carbon fuels were used to depress the trajectory of future carbon in the atmosphere, a country like Bangladesh would be far more interested in an immediate and continuing claim on some of the proceeds of such a tax than on the future climatic effects of the tax.
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From page 483... ...
2. Studies on whether the Arctic sea ice will completely melt in summer, and if so, whether the ice will remain melted in winter, as suggested by Flohn (l982)
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From page 484... ...
indicates that with less ice, winter storm tracks shift poleward, presumably because the intensity of the winter polar high is reduced. Since the surface temperature (and the temperature at the top of the intensified Arctic stratus layer)
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From page 485... ...
A number of climate and ice models suggest that the Arctic ice may melt in summer with a warming of about the magnitude that may be induced by a doubling of C02 and increase of other greenhouse gases, but this conclusion must be viewed as still tentative. The representations of the Arctic in energy balance and most climate models that have melted Arctic ice with a O>2 warming usually do not include changes in cloud cover, ice dynamics, or the effects of open leads and salinity stratification.
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From page 486... ...
. Arctic sea ice decay simulated for a C02-induced temperature rise.
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From page 487... ...
Fletcher National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration William Hibler Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/NOAA William W Kellogg National Center for Atmospheric Research Michael C
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From page 488... ...
The first precise numerical calculations about how much increased carbon dioxide concentrations would influence the Earth's surface temperature were made by Svante Arrhenius (l896, l908)
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From page 489... ...
G Plass, of the Aeronutronic Division of the Ford Motor Company, was responsible during the l950s for the development of surface energy balance approaches to climate sensitivity that yielded the first "modern" estimates of global surface temperature response to increased CO2.
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From page 490... ...
. .It is estimated that a doubling of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere would produce an average atmospheric temperature rise of 3.8 degrees (Celsius)
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From page 491... ...
The CO2 issue was subsequently raised as a national concern in Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, the Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee, in l965. Since that time, the CO2 issue has been included in most lists of potentially serious environmental problems.
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From page 492... ...
how a long-term program of domestic and international research, monitoring, modeling, and assessment of the causes and effects of varying levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide Public Law 96-294, June 30, l980; Title VII -- Acid Precipitation Program and Carbon Dioxide Study; Subtitle B -- Carbon Dioxide 492
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From page 493... ...
what domestic resources should be made available to such a program; (4) how the ongoing United States Government carbon dioxide assessment program should be modified so as to be of increased utility in providing information and recommendations of the highest possible value to government policy makers; and (5)
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From page 494... ...
He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering and has served in numerous capacities as an advisor on national and international scientific affairs. He is a former Chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere and is currently a Member of the National Science Board as well as Chairman of the Peer Review Panel on Acid Rain of the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy.
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From page 495... ...
He has served on many NRC committees in atmospheric sciences and is Past Chairman of the Joint Organizing Committee for the Global Atmospheric Research Program and the Joint Scientific Committee for the World Climate Research Program.
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From page 496... ...
496 of the Ecological Society of America, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the founders of the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Resources Institute, and is currently Chairman of the World Wildlife Fund and the International Conference on the World after Nuclear War.
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From page 497... ...
. Carbon Dioxide Changing climate ID//00003198
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