by R.L. Miller, TakePart, July 27, 2013
This week, news broke that if all [actually, 50 Gt is about 3.5-5.0% of the methane estimated to lie below the subsea permafrost of the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf: see article with Shakhova interview included at this link: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/01/19/406762/arctic-methane-outgassing-on-the-east-siberian-shelf-primer-interview-dr-natalia-shakhova/] the methane off the East Siberian seafloor was released, the fallout would cost $60 trillion — a huge, staggering number.
For comparison’s sake, the world’s GDP is $70 trillion. The findings
assume that 50 gigatons of methane would be released over the course of
10 to 20 years in a warming pulse.
Some climate scientists disagree with the underlying assumption.
Gavin Schmidt has taken to Twitter to argue that 50 gigatons is an
excessive estimate; prior warming periods didn’t show similarly large
releases of methane.
On the other hand, climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann tells TakePart:
“The precise magnitude [of methane] is an object of valid debate, but
the possibility of a substantial release cannot be dismissed out of
hand.” Climate modelers have underestimated Greenland sheet ice and
Arctic sea ice melt, so the estimate is not outside the realm of
possibility.
Very large numbers make us sit up and take notice, but they’re also
hard to grasp. What is climate change currently costing even without
that warming pulse? A NRDC report
estimates that American taxpayers, through the federal government, paid
$100 billion in 2012 — more than the cost of education or transportation.
(And that doesn’t include what state and local governments, insurers,
or private citizens paid.) Mann estimates the global cost at $1.4
trillion per year in coastal damage, droughts, fires, floods and
hurricanes.
We know that Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to armor New York City to
protect against the next Sandy has a $20 billion price tag. No similar
grand proposal has been made for other great cities of the East
Coast — Boston, Washington, D.C., or Charleston. No similar proposal has
been made for Midwestern cities facing floods, or Southwestern cities,
where wildfire season now starts July 1 and ends June 30.
And what of Miami? It contributed $263 billion to gross domestic product in 2010, according to the Bureau of Economic Advisors. Caught between rising seas to the east and the Everglades to the west, the city is doomed to drown.
Abandoning Miami means not only moving or abandoning the businesses
who create its gross domestic product, but walking away from its pricey
real estate, its roads, hospitals, schools and infrastructure. The cost
of relocating its people needs to be calculated both in dollars and in
heartbreak. But if you ask people to estimate the cost of abandoning
Miami, you get blank stares. It’s as if the language to ask the question
hasn’t been invented yet.
“It is not difficult to envision much larger costs, [i.e., $60
trillion] given the potential larger and more abrupt warming [the more
abrupt the warming, the more costly it is to try to adapt] that the
authors calculate,” says Mann. And it’s not difficult to imagine that
there are costs we haven’t even begun to imagine. And when you multiply
those costs, city after city after city, suddenly $60 trillion becomes a
very realistic and frightening number.
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