RDH - New Study Shows Global Warming Pleases Humanity; Governments Everywhere May Be Off the Hook

New Study Shows Global Warming Pleases Humanity; Governments Everywhere May Be Off the Hook

February 5, 2008

At first, when it came to global warming, the only skeptics worthy of an audience were those who refused to admit not only that average global temperatures were actually rising but that such a phenomenon might be caused by human activity. Now, however, that other breed of skeptics—those who haven’t been ready to admit that a warming planet is necessarily a bad thing—will apparently have their day in court.

In short, the results of a new study commissioned by the independent Committee for Letting Humans Be Human seem to support their hunch. Human beings, it turns out, may actually stand to benefit—if not from the fact of higher average global temperatures, then from those activities that cause such warming and even from the collateral damage that warming in turn might cause.

The study was conducted in the form of a survey that analyzed data from the last ten years of special reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and rephrased the results as hypothetical questions about basic quality-of-life issues. Let's first look at the survey—whose respondents consisted of adult male property owners on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in certain gated communities outside Miami, Florida—then discuss the results.

GLOBAL WARMING: A QUALITY-OF-LIFE SURVEY

Rate your reaction to each of the following fantasies on a scale of 1 to 5, according to the following key:

1—sounds like a nightmare
2—makes me uncomfortable
3—doesn't particularly turn me on
4—causes mildly pleasant feelings
5—seems like a dream come true

1. You're at a stoplight near your home, and you're driving a very fast, very luxurious automobile — yours. You can afford all the gas you might need. The light turns green and you race toward your goal — a prime parking spot in a secure garage, yours for a lifetime.___

2. You're shopping for toothpaste and other toiletries. You scan the varieties — forty or so (with or without whiteners, mouthwash, tartar control, baking soda, peroxide, desensitizing agents, etc.) — in a number of flavors delivered by an array of innovative packages. You opt for a tube — classic, traditional — which comes in its own box. You consider gift wrap but decide that the box is attractive enough as is. You move on to the deodorant section . . .___

3. You read in the newspapers over morning coffee that nearly three billion people have perished from various causes — flooding, malaria, drought — in the last year. Apparently, a tipping point has been reached. While noting with a sense of kinship that Amsterdam has been spared (along with, thank God, Manhattan and most of Florida), you vaguely wonder if a renaissance on the scale of the one following the Black Death might occur. Investment opportunities spring to mind.___

4. You sit down with your architect to go over plans for a twenty-nine room home on about fifteen acres of rural land. You discuss energy efficiency and decide that about a third of the home will be underground.___

5. You arrive at the grocery store, having forgotten your collection of cloth bags. Your nagging guilt is assuaged at the checkout by the cheerful, young, pretty cashier, who asks you whether you want paper or plastic. "Which one is better for the environment?" you gamely ask. "We accept your plastic bags for recycling," she responds. Grateful for this tidbit, you opt for plastic.___

6. One morning, you awake to realize that you feel slightly warm. You grab the remote control from your bedside table and lower the thermostat from 70 degrees Fahrenheit to 68.___

7. You need about $200 worth of groceries. You drive to the store and buy them.___

8. Your favorite watch stops working. You debate repairing it; in the meantime, you purchase a Casio G-Shock atomic with "tough solar."___

9. You notice that you're not being bothered by mosquitoes the way you used to be many summers ago, when you were a child in northern Minnesota. In fact, you notice how bug-free much of your life is, and you are thankful for it.___

10. You realize that you've never contracted malaria or been bitten by a poisonous snake. Nor have you had to swim amongst piranhas. Unlike your cats, you've never had any type of roundworm (or any type of worm at all, your experience with such creatures limited to the baits you used to hook when you went fishing with your father), and your recent weight loss was almost certainly the result of those extra thirty minutes of swimming every day on your recent two-week vacation. You climb into your leech-free sauna bath, thinking that species diversity must be a good thing because everyone says it is, but you're frankly unable to see exactly why.___

11. Your five-year-old computer seems to have slowed down. You order a new one, pleased by how flashy the new machine looks in the photographs and by how much better the purchasing interface looks this time around (Moore's Law seems to apply to product design, too). You're excited by the twenty-inch flat-panel monitor and 5:1 speaker setup. Will this configuration finally eclipse your home-entertainment center? Will it in some ways become your home entertainment center?___

12. You're hungry. Very hungry. You're driving your Audi somewhere in Michigan. Fortunately, there's a McDonald's at the next exit. You pull in, get premium-grade gasoline, then park, walk into the restaurant section, and place your order. Sometimes a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is just what the doctor ordered. A large Diet Coke helps it to go down. Thanks to your brutally intense, hour-a-day workouts, you can afford such luxuries. Minutes later, beaming inside, refreshed, you find the on-ramp and, with a deliberate series of upshifts, growls give way to purrs, and the Golden Arches shrink in your rearview mirror, appearing smaller than they are.___

The results were a cinch to tabulate. The average score across all fantasies was a 5 (rounded up from 4.8). Analysis of the results proved somewhat more difficult. First, let's start by taking a look at the average result for each question individually:

1.—5 | 2.—5 | 3.—5 | 4.—3.9 | 5.—5 | 6.—5 | 7.—5 | 8.—3.8 | 9.—5 | 10.—5 | 11—5 | 12.—4.4

Except for fantasy scenarios nos. 4 (meeting with the architect), 8 (Casio G-Shock), and 12 (gas and McDonald's somewhere in Michigan), the survey respondents were universally pleased. Even these lesser fantasies were, on average, judged to be somewhat pleasant. Besides, there will always be those who don't love the thought of living partly underground (no. 4); and some people might look down on a Casio, no matter how superior the G-Shock might be to, say, a $10,000 self-winding Bulova, whose mechanical movement is no match, accuracy-wise, for inexpensive quartz (let alone radio synchronization with the atomic clock at Ft. Collins); and, finally, some people aren't crazy about Michigan, or perhaps a meal from McDonald's doesn't appeal to every last adult property-owning male from Miami or Manhattan (some will have been corrupted by the rhetoric of a mate who, if she eats hamburgers at all, will insist on something local and humane).

Now for the analysis. It's not clear how global warming will play out. But it is clear that the activities that are said in some way to contribute to global warming are deeply pleasurable, on average, to rich people who own a significant stake in the planet. Moreover, though some people might stand to lose something from the consequences of global warming, there are perhaps just as many who stand to thrive in the face of these changes. If there's a chance that you might be one of the fortunate ones, you'll want to think twice about adopting any measures to curb a phenomenon whose future remains up in the air.