Zeke Hausfather wrote: > To be fair James, the "wibble" on Grist that humans (and most life on > earth) tends to be well-adapted to current climates, and that rapid > climate change would severely damage natural systems and impose > potentially large costs on the economy, has fairly strong support in > the literature. We can quibble over the term "optimal", but it seems > clear that under most scenarios anthropogenic warming will have > widespread negative effects vis-a-vis the status quo. >
Well, I don't want to be too picky, but there is a huge spread of options covered by "well adapted", "adequately adapted", "optimally adapted". I don't think the last is defensible under any plausible definition of "optimally", but it was the specific (and wholly unsupported) claim of the linked Grist article, which was the only support cited for that aspect of the whole post. In fact the Grist article was even worse than that, because even if we were "optimally adapted" to the current climate (whatever that means) then it still does not follow that climate changes would bring a net loss, as previously discussed here: <http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/browse_thread/thread/de041f09df3d3873/f112b10bb1d1073b?#f112b10bb1d1073b> Indeed according to the economic analyses I've seen, modest climate change (roughly, the amount we are committed to at current GHG levels) will likely bring net benefits. I don't dispute that rapid and substantial climate change may (indeed will, for some values of rapid and substantial) bring problems. But I'm concerned when I see scientists trotting out ideas such as "optimally adapted", as it suggests to me that they aren't even trying to get to grips with the issues in a reasonably objective manner. James --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
