Written by Lee Norris
Any stimulus plan for the current recession should support solutions to climate change as well as stabilizing today's markets. If action is not taken on global warming, the economies of the world will go into deeper and deeper recessions and the quality of human life will deteriorate. Arguments against this position can be made that any discussion on global warming involves too many uncertainties to spend large sums of money on. Some people question the accuracy of computer models. Still others argue that global warming is a hoax.
Such arguments never have a sound basis in fact. The computer models used today to predict the effects of climate change are the best that science has to offer. These models are becoming more accurate all the time with new data. Also, satellite technology confirms that the earth's atmosphere is heating up by measuring the amounts of infrared radiation being reflected back into space. The best knowledge of today has confirmed that the earth's atmosphere is heating up due to man made greenhouse gases. Another problem caused by rising carbon dioxide levels is that oceans of the world are also experiencing falling pH levels. Recessions are times to rethink and restructure the way economies operate. United States and the rest of the world can not go back into the same wasteful consume and discard based economies of the past.
The economic consequences of large portions of the Earth's land becoming uninhabitable, farm lands turning to desert, wild fires, rising sea levels, more tornadoes and bigger hurricanes would be horrendous. There is also the very real possibility that further warming could melt the permafrost in the arctic tundra releasing billions of tons of trapped methane gas. At the very least, what would the cost to both industrialized and developing countries be of having many times more refuges in the world than there are today. Some estimate that the cost could approach nine trillion dollars in today's money.
The projected costs of stabilizing climate change are enormous, but in the future those costs will be catastrophic and soon become impossible to meet. Many researches in the field believe that there is only 10 to 15 years left to address climate change, and after that it could be too late. According to the Stern Report, global warming could cut the world's future economic growth by 20%.