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Temperature is the metric that people generally use in measuring climate change, but other impacts may be more important to life one Earth --- including human life. Patterns of rainfalls and snowfall are likely to be affect, with profound implications for supplies of fresh water and food. There will be more flooding and wider droughts.
In Africa increased water stress and a resulting drop in food production are likely to develop by 2020, the International Panel on Climate Change warned in its Fourth Assessment Report. With small increases in temperatures, the IPCC said, food production will rise worldwide, but if warming continues it will then fall. At low latitudes, where most of the planet’s population lives, crop productivity will fall with even small temperature increases. This will bring a risk of increasing hunger.
The costs, both human and economic, of coastal flooding are likely to rise with climate changes already under way. The sea level is rising and there is some evidence that storms are becoming more powerful. The numbers of people affected will be largest in the deltas of Africa and Asia. In the diplomacy of climate policy, one vigorous lobby is a group of small island states that fear obliteration by the rising oceans.
The impacts of climate change are distributed around the world in ways that raise profound questions of fairness. Most of the emissions of greenhouse gases come from the temperate belt of the Northern Hemisphere. Most of the consequences will fall on the small number of people north of that belt, where rapid change is already visible, and the huge number who live to the south of it. People living in the poor countries of the south have the fewest resources to cope with change and the smallest margin between survival and disaster.
Some impacts of climate change tend to reinforce and speed up the processes that have already begun. One prominent example is the melting of Arctic sea ice. The ice is highly reflective. As it disappears, it is replaced by the dark surface of the water absorbing the sun’s heat much more efficiently and in turn accelerating the melting of the remaining ice. One danger in the present warming is the possibility that it will trigger similar and more powerful feedback mechanisms, forcing changes even faster than the IPCC’s projections suggest.
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Panel: Evaluating the Impacts of Climate Change
Understanding Transatlantic Differences
An RFF Co-Hosted Seminar
Speakers address the evolution of climate change impact assessment, the social cost of carbon, and challenges that hinder efforts to evaluate climate change damages. |
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Forests & Global
Climate Change:
Potential Impacts on U.S. Forest Resources
February 2003
Herman Shugart, University of Virginia
Roger Sedjo,
Resources for the Future
Brent Sohngen, The Ohio State University
This report was prepared for the Pew
Center on Global Climate Change |
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The
Contextual Determinants of Malaria
Elizabeth Casman and Hadi Dowlatabadi, editors
RFF Press, 2002
The climate policy community has been
buffeted by claims concerning the impact of climate change
on malaria. This volume examines the disease's contextual
determinants and attempts to develop methods for incorporating
them into projections of future incidence. The contributors
argue that increases in incidence will have at least as
much to do with human aging, poverty, urbanization, and
population movement as with a rise in global temperatures. |
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