Businesses are beginning to talk about climate change in different
terms. Instead of debating whether humans are causing it, there’s a
lot more talk about what climate change might mean to the business
climate. Lester Graham reports there are questions about what might
happen to affect business as global temperatures and weather patterns change:
Transcript
Businesses are beginning to talk about climate change in different
terms. Instead of debating whether humans are causing it, there’s a
lot more talk about what climate change might mean to the business
climate. Lester Graham reports there are questions about what might
happen to affect business as global temperatures and weather patterns change:
For the last couple of decades, the people who’ve been arguing that we
have to do something to reduce the greenhouse emissions causing global
warming avoided one subject:
“People did not want to talk about adaptation or coping with climate
change because that was seen as a cop-out.”
That’s Rosina Bierbaum. She was a science advisor during the Clinton
administration and is now the Dean of the School of Natural Resources
and Environment at the University of Michigan.
The fear was, if you could figure out a way to cope with global
warming, you wouldn’t do anything to reduce the emissions causing it.
But Bierbaum says with concensus among the majority of the scientists in
the world that global warming is happening and humans are contributing,
the point has been made. Time to move on:
“It’s only really been, I would say, in the last two years that the
science has become so clear, that the changes are occurring so fast.
And we’re seeing them already… that society is realizing we’ve got to
cope with those changes now and there are more in store for us.”
Actually, Bierbaum thinks we’re really kind of behind in thinking about
the consequences of global warming. It’s not just the polar ice caps
melting and the rising sea levels. There are a lot of everyday sort of
things that will likely change.
For instance, what kind of plants should you put in your home
landscaping? Will the tree you plant today survive in the changing
climate? How flexible is your business if the climate changes weather
patterns?
Thomas Karl is the Director of the National Climatic Data Center at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He says people have
to start thinking about things like that. And Karl says it’s not just
higher temperatures, but sudden dramatic changes, such as maybe no snow
in the Northern states for a couple of years at a time. Or dry spells
that could make rivers so low that barges can’t travel up and down
them:
“What really has important impacts are the extreme events. I think the
questions being asked along these lines are ‘How vulnerable am I to
these episodic conditions?’ and ‘What do we need to do to prepare
ourselves for the possibility that things may not change gradually, but
could be quite abrupt change?'”
Some of those extreme events are heavier storms. As hurricane Katrina
showed, that could affect a lot of things. For example, the oil
industry is looking at its refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. With more
and more intense hurricanes, could it be worth building
refineries somewhere else?
There’s a lot at risk.
Franklin Nutter is the President of the Reinsurance Association of
America: the insurers of the insurance companies. He says with more
forest fires in the West, and unpredictability in agriculture, and more
violent storm surges on the coasts… all due to climate change, it’s
going to cost:
“Someone has to pay for the repair and recovery. If the insurance
mechanism is going to be the intermediary that translates those costs
into people’s premiums, then the answer is insurance premiums are going
to have to match those.”
And that means we’re all going to pay higher insurance costs because
some people and businesses are going to ignore, or miscalculate, how
climate change is going to affect them:
“The Association of British Insurers did a study looking at just the
effect of climate change on insurability and held steady population
growth, property values, all of those things. And they concluded that
you could see insurance premiums rise by 60% by mid-century just as a
result of climate change.”
That means if nothing changed: no inflation, no currency change…
nothing except global warming, insurance rates go up 60% during the
next 30 to 40 years. You’re already seeing it.
Some climate change experts say we can slow the impacts of global
warming by reducing greenhouse emissions now. But we’re already
seeing change… and we will see more.
There will be winners in global climate change. Some growing seasons
will be extended. Some areas will get more precipitation. But there
will likely be a lot more losers as businesses and people either can’t
or won’t adjust to the changing climate of their region.
For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.