Whether one accepts or rejects the
hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change, evidences does suggest that our
planet is going through yet another warming cycle.
Climatologists warn of dire consequences;
global food shortages, flooding and other apocalyptic events. Such is the case
of a LiveScience article, reposted on Yahoo News, that predicts that I may now be
directly affected. It turns out that the coffee crop in Costa Rica is suffering
from the higher temperatures.
Coffee is my life blood and I would have to
take the climatologists seriously if I hadn’t been trained to observe and
interpret human behavior. Economists, you see, study what people actually do,
not what they should do, or what we would like them to do.
For example, climatologists warn that the
polar ice caps will melt and result in increased ocean levels. One estimate I
found suggests that the rise could be as much as 2 meters (6.5 ft) by the year
2100 (National Geographic). That’s about 91 mm per year (0.9 in).
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| Spanish Banks, Vancouver BC |
Spanish Banks, a beautiful beach near the
University of British Columbia, regularly has tide changes of 3.6 m (12 ft.) in
a 7 hour period. That means that the water can move out by 400 meters (1/4
mile) at low tide. In the summer, families can be seen playing near the water’s
edge at low tide. Children build sand castles in the wet sand.
When the tide comes in, the water level
rises by a half meter (20 inches) every hour. Surprisingly, no one ever drowns.
Even the children eventually realize that their fortresses are doomed and move
to higher ground. Observation of human behavior suggests that, as the oceans
rise, some people will build dykes to protect the property, and eventually, all
will move to higher ground. This is not going to be a costless exercise, but it
will happen.
The same basic human behavior will
determine the price of my coffee. It may be that Peter Lehrer, author of the
LiveScience article, loses his coffee plantation as temperatures rise but
economics suggests that coffee prices won’t rise. As the article states, land that
is higher up on the mountain and currently too cold for coffee, may become
farmable. Enterprising coffee growers, reacting to price changes will plant
coffee at higher altitudes. As the planet warms, it will be possible to grow
coffee further from the equator, and the market mechanism suggests that people
will plant there as well.
Mr. Lehrer will be incurring costs from
global warming disproportionately when compared to others on the planet, but
that is a topic for another blog.
Climate change will cause changes in where
and how we live. The transition is going to be expensive and is going to happen
when is it no longer prudent to maintain the status quo. I, for one, am going
to buy some ocean front property … in Houston.
If there is one thing above all about your approach to world events as an Economist and as Michael Leonard, second cousin, is your levity and casual approach to potential crisis until the potentiality becomes clear and the crisis can be identified, verified and planned. I believe there is a time for strategies, a time for action and rarely a time for worry. One either tackles an issue or does not. Worry is like fear, Roosevelt would have ascribed some descriptive phrase like "the only thing to worry about is worry itself..." and he would be correct in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteTo me you interest rate piece and the following one a cup of coffee both bare the same 'concerns' -(why I put them in single quotes, I do know, but it perhaps give them the emphasis that so many pundits and soap-boxers want to have placed on the subjects).
Both of them have similar answers in the 'we do not know for sure about anything' response category. I respect and love the way you bring a soap-boxer down to eye-level, turn a rant into a rap-song and turn a phrase. I enjoy going down the paths you create and turning around the corners which we both know are coming, we just don't have one heckuva lot of confidence in predicting whether to veer left or right, except that usually, like life the end of the trip is predictable whether one believes in fate or religion or nothing at all.
Thanks for being dumb and being two of you - it is always good to be assured that there is if not sober thought, at least the potential for a sober second thought between you. :-)