Global warming will be good for U.S. agriculture
April 28th, 2007Researchers at MIT and UCSB (which by the way has a lovely campus) found small positive effects (an increase in profits of 4%) of global warming for U.S. agriculture.
First, they looked at historical trends in the relationship of temperature and precipitation on agriculture profits.
They then used a climate model to predict temperature and precipitation in the U.S. Plugging those weather predictions into their estimated profit equations gave the predicted increase in profits.
Their results couldn’t preclude the possibility that there will be no effect of global warming on agricultural profits. It seems the debate is between those that think there will be a positive impact and those that believe there will be no impact. There’s no reason to believe there might be a negative impact of global warming on American agriculture.
May 1st, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Unless of course the natural disasters from said climate change wipe out a significant portion of your market.
May 1st, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Unless of course an asteroid hit wipes out a significant portion of your market.
May 1st, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Unless of course AIDS wipes out a significant portion of your market.
May 1st, 2007 at 8:43 pm
Unless of course the U.S. starts a nuclear war with China wiping out a significant portion of your market.
May 1st, 2007 at 8:45 pm
This is fun…
Unless of course financial instability sends the world economy into a tail spin wiping out a significant portion of your market.
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:11 am
You forgot the SARS. And Poland.
May 11th, 2007 at 1:36 am
So are you saying we shouldn’t give a shit about any of these things just because there are other risks to life as well?
May 11th, 2007 at 1:37 am
It seems to me that every response you gave currently has people working feverishly to mitigate the possibility that that event will occur.
May 11th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
“people” are working “feverishly”
How many people should we take from these other causes to fix global warming? How much less feverishly should we ask people to work on those other issues so they can work on global warming?
The point is there are other problems and we have limited resources. Also, we don’t know how big of a problem global warming might be and the point of the post is that there’s some evidence that it will won’t be a problem at all.