We will all be losers from climate change
Reflections following a trip to the mountains of western Canada
In a previous blog I described the problems created by simplistic economic reasoning used to estimate the costs of climate change impacts and the measures to address them. In this blog I address another example of such thinking and its dangerous implications.
In western Canada the impact and dangers of climate change are increasingly obvious. I learned this firsthand during an extraordinary experience this summer hiking in the Purcell Mountains in British Columbia, several hours west of Calgary and accessible primarily by helicopter. My trip was uncertain until days before scheduled departure due to wildfires close to the mountains in the town of Jasper, which forced the evacuation of 25,000 people in late July. The wildfires were the result of thousands of lightning strikes after an extended heat wave and forests dry due to lack of rain. Hundreds of firefighters, some from as far away as Australia, came to fight the blaze which burned out of control for nearly four weeks. Much of the town was left in ruins.
The damage was not confined to Canada. Smoke and ash drifted over several midwestern states in the U.S. necessitating air quality alerts and warnings to stay indoors. The U.S. was similarly impacted by wildfire smoke from northeastern Canada last June putting around 100 million people across 16 states under air quality alerts. Such events are also associated with poor indoor air quality, a growing source of health issues as well.
My trip was fortunately just far enough away from the smoke and fires to obtain one of the few helicopters not in use for firefighting and to go ahead as scheduled. The air quality was sometimes hazy due to smoke, but we were otherwise safe. However, the impact of climate change was evident in other ways. The mountains are home to dozens of glaciers, steadily shrinking in response to warmer temperatures. One hike was notable for markers indicating where the ice had extended in the past, showing a considerable distance from the glacier’s reach 10 and 20 years ago.
The experience of western Canada stands in striking contrast with assertions sometimes made that Canada, Siberia, Greenland, and other high-latitude regions are going to be beneficiaries from climate change. Even while observing melting glaciers, a fellow hiker claiming some scientific knowledge told me the residents of Greenland look forward to much higher property values thanks to warmer temperatures. While acknowledging “no place on Earth will be unaffected by climate change,“ a 2022 Time magazine article optimistically concludes former Rustbelt cities “will experience a renaissance” while Alaska “looks the best place to live in the U.S.” An earlier article in The Atlantic went so far as to argue the Inuit population in Arctic could be among the biggest winners of all.
While some locations may be relatively less at risk, we will all be impacted by mass extinction of species, declining farm production, enormous numbers of climate migrants, and threats to national security. As the Canada wildfires show, even locations at high latitudes can be devastated by the combination of extreme temperatures and droughts. Russia, too, has had this experience. A heat wave in Moscow lasted 44 days leading to numerous wildfires near the city, resulting in high levels of particulate pollution and thousands of deaths.
The more we learn about climate change, the more reason to be skeptical regarding predictions there will be “winners” at high latitudes. For one, warming is occurring much faster at high latitudes and will continue to do so in the future, making assumptions about climatic conditions much more difficult. Investments in land use, especially farming, require some continuity over decades, no longer possible at high latitudes. A second problem is the suitability of lands unfrozen by warming for agriculture and other economic activities; much of what has been exposed turns out to be areas of barren rock or in the case of Siberia unstable ground. Then there are the unknown consequences of warming, some of which may be dramatic such as a recent colossal rockslide in Greenland so massive it triggered a wave 200 meters high with sufficient force vibrations were detected by seismometers worldwide for 9 days. The landslide was caused by the thinning of a glacier, removing the support of the rocks above it.
I could have gone hiking in almost any other part of the world and been exposed to disruption of life due to climate change — wildfires in California and Greece, death of the coral reef in Australia, flooding in Central Europe. We will all be losers from climate change, and the more it warms the greater the losses will be. And so will our children, and their children, and their children, and so on. To refer to any locations as “winners” is to deny the seriousness of what’s at stake.
More proof of my point: before Hurricane Helene, Asheville, N.C. was considered a “safe haven”. Or as a NY Times essay was headlined, “You can’t hide from climate change”
