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Pro-active measures could avert future costs associated with a changing climate, researchers say

By Bob Berwyn

SUMMIT COUNTY — Using statistical methods borrowed from the insurance industry, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories say they’e calculated the potential economic costs of global warming for each of the lower 48 states. The results suggest that Colorado, along with California and the Pacific Northwest are the only parts of the country that might benefit economically, as people leave the states hit hardest by reduced water availability and move to less affected areas.

The experts at the lab said they did the study to pin some real numbers to climate change impacts.

“Absent any idea of costs, the need to address climate change seems remote and has a diluted sense of urgency,” study lead George Backus said. “It is the uncertainty associated with climate change that validates the need to act protectively and proactively.”

The study seems to indicated that some investments in pro-active mitigation — a kind of upfront insurance payment — could help forestall much larger economic problems down the road. For example, the study mentions building sea walls to protect against rising sea levels, developing and planting drought-resistant crops and removing carbon from the atmosphere through reforestation or geological sequestration.

To calculate the potential costs, the study used data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report. With that information, the the Sandia team estimated the range of precipitation conditions — from lows to highs — that could occur across the states. The study then presents the consequence of those levels of precipitation on the states’ economies and lays them out in tabular form.

By summarizing consequences over the range of predicted change — from the smallest to the greatest — the Sandia study is able to present a coherent grouping of results. Then, using well-accepted computer models, the study projects the net effect of climate change on a state’s agricultural and industrial base, and the subsequent movement of populations for livable wages.

While the uncertainty in climate change predictions are often given as a reason by those skeptical of climate change to ignore the problem because of the wide range of model results, the study’s authors take a point of view more common to insurance companies.

For insurance companies, greater uncertainty means greater risk. In such cases, insurance companies merely reflect the higher risk in a higher insurance premium. For example, the rates for well-understood risks, such as taking a commercial airline flight, are far lower than those for less-understood risks, such as taking a privately funded rocket flight.

“On the one hand, there’s a lot of uncertainty in quantifying climate change,” said Backus. “Everyone sees that. It’s this uncertainty that presents the greatest difficulty for policy makers. If society knew how change would exactly unfold, we could undertake adaptation and mitigation responses.”

Backus said that, despite uncertainties about the future, cost-benefit analyses are used on a daily basis to help policy makers in other areas, including health care, social security and defense.”

“One can emphasize the limitations of climate-change models, if one wants,” said Backus. “But the real effect of that is to accentuate risk. To an insurance company, it would mean an area is more dangerous, not less. The proper action for those who want to halt government initiatives in climate policies is to reduce the uncertainty, not raise it.  They need to demonstrate, if possible, that the future climatic conditions will remain below dangerous levels.”

Thus far, the only existing models say that if nothing is done now, “by the time the negative effects of climate change significantly affect populations, it will be too late to prevent the escalating damage,” Backus said.

Though the study stops short of applying its techniques to address effective mitigation techniques, its writers mention the early building of sea walls against the expected rise of oceans, planting crops resistant to drought and removing carbon from the atmosphere through reforestation or geological sequestration.

A further limitation is that the study only considers the impacts of near-term climate change on the U.S., disregarding worldwide impacts. It also has the imprecisions that result from neglecting a large number of influencing factors. It does not provide a risk analysis or reliability study of amelioration techniques.

But the study concludes that “the larger challenge lies not in the technical difficulties of such [analyses] but rather in the communication of the risk and uncertainty in a manner that connects to the vital concerns of the policymakers.”

Filed under: global warming, Summit County Colorado Tagged: | climate change, Environment, global warming, Sandia National Lab, Summit County News