All of these accept the premise that future damages from anthropogenic warming will be serious, i find this to be a useful discussion strategy: Climate change will cause massive heat and drought and leave people in need of food. OK, compare then, the most effective and optimistic scenarios for reducing CO2 emissions and preventing warming […]
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Posted in Adaptation, Price System on Dec 8th, 2015
Been reading a book on … apples. Early in the book there is a brief section on the history of good-tasting apples. What the author tells us is that most wild and old-time apples are called “quick spitters” because they taste so bad you spit them out quick. The good fruit, whether originally an accident of […]
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Posted in Adaptation, Central Planning on May 23rd, 2015
An acquaintance who knows a bit about organic farming and conventional farming and GMO techniques tells me that scientists have been able to take a gene from the barley and stick it in the wheat … and by doing so to irrigate wheat would require 1/8 as much water as conventional wheat requires. Perhaps instead […]
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Posted in Adaptation, Entrepreneurs on May 13th, 2015
Virtually every sweet potato ever eaten from cultivated crops, for thousands of years, naturally and organically produced, is transgenic (i.e. a GMO). It’s just that the hand of man did not do the modifying, rather the hand of Gaia/God/you_name_it. Citrus greening is caused by an invasive bacteria from Asia and is decimating American citrus production. […]
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Arnold Kling shares an email get received from the higher-ups at Swarthmore College: The managers of Swarthmore College agree that climate change is the most pressing issue of our time and that Swarthmore College can — and must — play a leadership role in helping to curb the seemingly insatiable appetite for fossil fuel. That’s my […]
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An article has been making the rounds recently about scientists at Harvard being fairly certain that aerosolic geoengineering approaches would be able to reduce the GHG effect by 50% or more, and in fact do so in a way that not only cools the planet, but does so in a way to ensure that we […]
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Posted in Adaptation, Environment on Dec 1st, 2014
Humans, most of the time, use their brains. We adapt. Here is some pretty startling research from Steven Levitt on the impacts of Hurricane Katrina. Note, that this is not to be construed as advocating breaking windows. he Economic Impact of Hurricane Katrina on its Victims: Evidence from Individual Tax Returns Tatyana Deryugina, Laura Kawano, […]
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