Stop the on climate change: The concern for future generations is misplaced, as they "not only will be better off, they will have at their disposal better and more effective technologies to address not just climate change, but any other sources of adversity.".

• Author: Goklany, Indur M.

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THE STATE-OF-THE-ART British-sponsored fast-track assessment (F/A) of the global impacts of climate change, whose authors include leading contributors to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), indicates that, through the year 2100, the effect of climate change on human health and environmental threats generally will be overshadowed by factors not related to global warming. Hence, climate change is unlikely to be the world's most important environmental problem of the 21st century.

Analysis using the much-heralded Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, which also drew on the FTA, reveals that, notwithstanding global warming, for the foreseeable future, human and environmental well-being will be highest under the "richest-but-warmest" scenario and lowest for the "poorest-but-coolest" scenario. In addition, the developing world's future well-being should exceed present levels by several-fold under each scenario, even exceeding present well-being in today's developed world under all but the poorest scenario. Accordingly, equity-based arguments, which hold that present generations should divert scarce resources from today's urgent problems to solve the potential dilemmas of tomorrow's wealthier generations, are unpersuasive.

Halting global warming would reduce cumulative mortality from various climate-sensitive threats, namely, hunger, malaria, and coastal flooding, by four to 10% in 2085, while increasing populations-at-risk from water stress and possibly worsening matters for biodiversity. Yet, according to cost information from the United Nations Millennium Project and the IPCC, measures focused specifically on reducing present vulnerability to these threats would reduce cumulative mortality from these risks by 50-75% at a fraction of the cost of reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs). Simultaneously, such measures would reduce major hurdles to the developing world's sustainable economic development, a lack of which is why they are most vulnerable to climate change.

The world best can combat global warming and advance well-being, particularly of its most at-risk populations, by reducing present-day vulnerabilities to climate-sensitive problems that could be exacerbated by climate change and broadly advancing their economic and technological development rather than through overly aggressive GHG reductions.

Economic and technological development can, on the one hand, improve human and environmental well-being by making better health care and environmental quality more affordable. On the other hand, it can increase greenhouse gas emissions, which can reduce well-being. Because of this tension, it is appropriate to ask whether, despite any economic growth, future well-being would be Lower in richer-but-warmer worlds than in poorer-but-cooler worlds and whether climate change will make future generations worse off than current generations.

Proponents of aggressive greenhouse gas controls would answer both questions in the affirmative. Many world leaders--including former Pres. Bill Clinton and his French counterpart, Jacques Chirac--maintain that climate change is the most important environmental issue of this century, while UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls it the defining issue of this generation. Yet, do analyses of the future impacts of global warming support these dire claims?

The Stern Review estimated that unmitigated climate change will reduce welfare by an amount equivalent to a reduction in consumption per capita of five to 20% "now and forever" if one accounts for market impacts, nonmarket (i.e., health and environmental) impacts, and the risk of catastrophe. It also suggests that, by the year 2200, the 95th percentile of the equivalent losses could rise to 35.2%. Many economists believe that these losses are overestimated. The IPCC, for instance, suggests that losses could be as high as a mere five percent.

Nevertheless, if one adjusts gross domestic product per capita used in the IPCC's richest-and-warmest scenario downward by 35.2% in 2100 (rather than 2200), which overestimates the equivalent loss of welfare due to climate change per even the Stern Review's upperbound estimate, net welfare per capita is found to be higher in 2100 than it was in 1990. The same result holds for the other (poorer) scenarios, assuming that the welfare losses due to climate change vary with the square of the average global temperature increase from 1990 to 2085 estimated for the scenario in question. Remarkably, despite overestimating the welfare losses due to climate change, net welfare in developing countries per capita should be higher in 2100 than it was for developed countries in 1990 for all but the poorest scenario.

These results call into question the basic premise underlying arguments that present generations morally are bound to take aggressive actions now to mitigate climate change because future generations' well-being otherwise will be worse off. Future generations not only will be better off, they will have at their disposal better and more effective technologies to address not just climate change, but any other sources of adversity.

Equally striking, however, is the fact that, although global...