Agreeing with Kooiti Masuda's closing comment, I repost his whole
comment here which was originally posted on my blog
<http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2007/01/baer-on-stern.html#1382981649143204616>.
I'll probably write a reply of my own shortly...
James
---------
Kooiti MASUDA said...
I agree that slow a climate change is not a catastrophe and we can and
should adapt to it. but, ...
> Crop yields will decline, particularly in Africa
I think that THIS is likely -- a very unfortunate thing.
There are two very distinct issues are there.
One is my outlook of climate change. It is difficult to predict future
distribution of aridity. But it is almost certain that local, short-term
precipitation can increase in proportional to saturation specific
humidity that is exponential in temperature, and that global mean
precipitation does not increase so much because it must almost match
global mean evaporation which is limited by energy balance at the
surface where the input will increase more or less like log(CO2 conc.).
Thus it is almost sure that precipitation tend to concentrate spatially
and temporally. In some places there will be excess of precipitation
which may lead to floods. Elsewhere precipitation does not increase to
match evaporation locally and the land would be more arid.
The other thing is the capacity of agriculture. The increase of crop
yield in the 20th century owe much to fossil fuel: chemical fertilizers,
pesticides, machines (e.g. tractors), large-scale irrigation, etc. They
do not logically depend on fossil fuel -- just on low-entropy energy
resources. But practically we cannot immediately substitute them with
renewable resources only (or even with nuclear power, for that matter).
We cannot assume either that the future generations will magically find
some novel low-entropy resources that we cannot access now.
After all, we cannot simply assume that future generations are richer,
or more adaptable. The world will be outside the realm of experience of
the age of fossil fuel. (I think this discussion should move to
"globalchange" forum.)
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