ABSTRACT
Editors’ note This chapter is the first in the book to have a specifically ‘future’ orientation. There are several key points that emerge from it. First there is a technical argument over whether we should assess future impacts by using a cutoff time horizon-say we calculate the costs of warming over a 100-year timescale as the climatologists usually do-or by using a discounting approach which can consider an infinite future-the economists’ usual approach. Then there is a discussion of the calculation of costs, on the one hand by considering a particular change in mean temperatures, and on the other by considering not the absolute change, but the rate of change instead. Max Wallis concludes that this is probably the more significant indicator: we have to keep rates of change sufficiently low that ecosystems and society can have a realistic hope of adaptation. And in this case the discounting approach is better than the time horizon approach. In Chapter 10 ironically Make Faber and John Proops introduce the idea of a time horizon cut-off for an entrepreneur-arguing that that is how economic individuals do indeed behave. The problems of rate of change and of adaptation have been considered by Jean Grove in a historical context in Chapter 3. This chapter is also a very useful introduction to the complexities and disagreements behind the scientific assessment of greenhouse warming with which the politicians grapple in Ros Taplin’s following chapter, Chapter 6. Wallis also begins to touch on the incapacity of the international system of sovereign states and market economies to handle the grave crisis he sees, but is unable within this chapter to pursue that new line of enquiry. We do not agree with his view that it is ‘irresponsible’ to argue that developing countries should be allowed greenhouse gas emissions as great as those of the industrialised countries in the past. It is not an argument, but a fact, that under the current system of states they will simply do what they see as necessary to relieve poverty —and the best hope of achieving that is to help in an economic transition on as short a time-scale as possible, since that will also accelerate the stabilisation of population levels. We have noted above that the poorest are most at risk from change, having fewest reserves to cushion the impact of change, and that is why poor countries reserve the right to increase the wealth of their people by what
they see as the most appropriate means. To persuade them to do otherwise will require concessional technology transfer from the industrialised nations.
