Here is news that Al Gorezerra may not want to hear.
Global Warming Hysteria headline of the day:
Global warming winner? Bet on Canada
Predicted climate change might not be bad for everyone.
Canada would be a net economic winner, according to an April U.N. report cited by a number of authorities in interviews in recent days. The paper predicted that milder temperatures would expand agriculture while boosting the economy with lower winter heating bills.
Yale University economics and environment professor Robert Mendelsohn lists a number of gains that Canada could expect from a 50- to 100-year shift to a generally warmer and wetter climate.
Among them would be the ability to grow fruit and vegetables in areas that now are useful only for grain, and the opening of iced-over Arctic waters to navigation and other commercial uses.
“Canadians will clearly be better off in the future than they are today. I can say that with confidence,” he said. “The most dramatic gains could be in agriculture, depending on precipitation.”
However, the complexity of global climate and limited understanding of data pose major problems in modeling climate change.
Mr. Mendelsohn said many of the consequences of global warming are unknown, such as changes in the type and size of cloud cover and precipitation.
Small changes, he said, “can cause lots of feedback.”
For the U.S., he said, warming trends will likely cause worse droughts, like the one currently threatening Georgia”s north, and a population shift northward.
Michael McCracken, CEO of the Ottawa-based economic research firm Informetrica Ltd., said “no one knows” what will happen.
He said some forecasters expect much colder winters and much hotter summers, which will create adjustment problems across Canada. Such changes would also bring such “social” costs, such as building seawalls around low-lying cities or moving their populations, and “individual” costs such as higher prices and taxes.
The problem, he said, is that world weather changes “are running ahead of the models,” so “the worry factor is high and growing.”
Stephen Leeb, New York-based investment analyst and editor of the Complete Investor newsletter, said that society has developed according to a fairly steady climate pattern and that change will not come easily if there is a dramatic shift.
Comparing the world to a city that has developed with people on the periphery and agriculture in the middle, if the inside becomes less productive for farming and the outskirts more productive, a theoretical shift is possible, but, he asked, “What do you do with all the buildings?”
According to Mr. Leeb, any dramatic climate change will not likely occur as a catastrophic shift in annual weather patterns but in up-and-down trends, with several years of warming followed by a sudden surge in repetitive cold weather.
The real question, Mr. Leeb said, is energy and whether Americans will find a solution to oil overuse and foreign dependency or take the consequences in terms of the environment and the economy if supplies run short and a fossil-fuel-dependent economy is left out in the heat and the cold.
Cato Institute senior fellow Pat Michaels shrugs off climate concerns as a matter of adapting and developing the economy around new inventions and innovations.
The problem of possible water shortages in places like California, he said, are more affected by the tens of millions of people who have moved there in recent decades than by any legislative efforts to save 50 feet of snow on nearby mountaintops. He said that if water or food supplies are affected by climate changes, the problem will be solved “when the pricing system comes into play.”
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