[MCN] Another weekly post -- Two perspectives on the same tragedy

[Lance Olsen]

“A new area of study is the field that some of us are beginning to call social traps. The term refers to situations in society that contain traps formally like a fish trap, where men or whole societies get themselves started in some direction or some set of relationships that later prove to be unpleasant or lethal and that they see no easy way to back out of or to avoid."

John Platt. Social Traps. American Psychologist, August 1973

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The emission of greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere is a by-product of modern marvels such as the production of vast amounts of energy, heating and cooling inhospitable environments to be amenable to human existence, and traveling great distances faster than our saddle-sore ancestors ever dreamed possible. 

However, these luxuries come at a price: climate changes in the form of severe droughts, extreme precipitation and temperatures, increased frequency of flooding in coastal cities, global warming, and sea-level rise (1, 2). 

This is the price we pay for the luxury of about 200 y of relatively unchecked greenhouse gas emissions.

The price of our emissions is not felt immediately throughout the entire climate system, however, because processes such as ice sheet melt and the expansion of warming ocean water act over the course of centuries. Thus, even if all greenhouse gas emissions immediately ceased, our past emissions have already “locked in” some amount of continued global warming…

Lasting coastal hazards from past greenhouse gas emissions <https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/11/06/1917051116>
Tony E. Wong. PNAS first published November 7, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1917051116 <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1917051116>





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“Booms have consequences.”

James Grant. Money of the Mind : Borrowing and Lending in America from the Civil War to Michael Milken. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1992.
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“The growth in CO2 emissions closely follows the growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) corrected for improvements in energy efficiency.”

P. Friedlingstein, et al. “Update on CO2 emissions.” 
Nature Geoscience. Published online: 21 November 2010
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In a July, 2001 editorial, The Economist said that “It is no coincidence that the deepest and most protracted recessions in recent decades have taken hold in countries that experienced booms ...”  
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“Changes in world GDP (WGDP) have a significant effect on CO2 concentrations, so that years of above-trend WGDP are years of greater rise of CO2 concentrations.”

Granados et al. Climate change and the world economy: short-run determinants of atmospheric CO2. Environmental science & policy 21 (2012) 50–62



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