Is Climate Change Beneficial?

Is global warming real?

If global warming is real is it being caused by the actions of humans?

For every billion words written about the two questions, global warming (now reconfigured as “climate change” by the spin doctors) about ten words in total are written about the more valid question, “What does it matter whether the earth’s atmospheric temperatures are warming or cooling?”

If global warming, or global cooling, were not taking place the earth would be in a great deal of trouble.  The earth is just not set up to be static.



Even an 1870's school child understood thermal zones and their importance



 The second question is a silly one as well.  Of course the actions of mankind have some amount of influence on overall warming and cooling.  This blog includes many entries discussing how the inappropriate actions of the pop-environmental movement result in increased releases of carbon to the atmosphere.  In fact, if it could be measured, I believe the pop-enviros are almost certainly responsible for as much climate change as industry is, at least in the United States (see earlier blogs on the greenhouse gas and toxic metals emissions of forest fires).

Politically, of course, the two questions posed above matter a great deal.  In idle moments between inventing the internet and helping to run the United States Al Gore almost singlehandedly invented global warming and, just incidentally, made a great deal of money doing just that.

The pop-environmental movement raises and spends more money each year than the Democrats and the Republicrats (we used to call them Republicans in the United States but now, for the most part, the two parties are pretty much indistinguishable) do in a presidential election year.  A large part of the money raised is provided by raising the specter of death and destruction coming to fuzzy little creatures as the result of climate change.

More significantly, especially in terms of the ability of "environmental" groups to raise money, individuals may be impacted, or be led to believe they are impacted, by climate change. 

American politician Tip O’Neill is famously cited as at least one source for the quote, “All politics are local.”

In terms of global warming, or any other issue, the perceived impact a person feels overcomes all the science surrounding an issue.

By way of example, one of the most influential people in the world is Bjorn Lomborg, a European scientist who’s written devastating critiques of the hysteria surrounding climate change.  It should be noted, the devastation is not due to Lomborg’s positions; instead, Lomborg is hated by the pop-environmental movement because he fearlessly puts forward irrefutable science regarding warming and cooling of the earth's atmosphere.

If you don't already own this book, you should buy it and, more importantly, read it!

Lomborg points out that far more people in the world die each year as a result of cold than die from heat.  But if your 110 year old grandmother dies in the middle of summer on an especially hot day you will, if you are like most people, be forever convinced that global warming killed the old girl.

But Grandma’s death leads to a more important question.

Are there benefits to global warming?  Should we, as Al Gore would try to convince us, automatically assume global warming, or climate change, is a negative thing?

If ten grandmas die from heat, for example, but 20 children do not die from cold have we not benefitted from global warming?

As the atmosphere warms, temperate zones move north and south in terms of the globe.  The area where I live was, a few thousand years ago, covered by a thick sheet of ice.  Now it is home to some of the world’s most livable cities, large expanses of forest and thousands of acres of farmland.  We’ve certainly benefitted from global warming and climate change in Bellingham, Washington.

The movement of the temperate zones opens up incredibly productive lands to agriculture.  It’s no accident that the Canadian northlands are breadbaskets for the rest of the world.

But we concentrate on the downsides of the equation.  Forest composition, for example, changes when the temperate zones move.  Old trees die as their surroundings lose their hospitality to this or that species.  But that is the nature of things.  The sandstone found near Bellingham contains palm frond fossils meaning that before the region was buried in ice, it was covered by tropical forests.  Tropical forests that died at least partly due to climate change. 

Of course climate change is real and, of course the activity of mankind is responsible for at least some small amount of that change. 

What we really need much more discussion about is the possible benefits of climate change and about how we can use some of the tens of billions of dollars we waste on “fighting” the inevitable to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on those who are harmed by the change.

The earth will change with or without us.  If we are willing to use that change in beneficial ways we can build a better future for all human kind.  If we are not willing to adjust to that change, the earth may go about its own change; without us!