Notes
245 notes introduction: the weather on factory planet x Fewer than one in a hundred Evan Mills, “Insurance in a Climate of Change,” Science 302, August 12, 2005, pp. 1040–1044, online at www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1040.full. Mills’s catalog of the threats climate change poses to the insurance industry is sobering: “Specific technical risks include the following: (i) Shortening times between loss events. (ii) Changing absolute and relative variability of losses. (iii) Changing structure of types of events. (iv) Shifting spatial distribution of events. (v) Damage functions that increase exponentially with weather intensity (e.g., wind damages rise with the cube of the speed). (vi) Abrupt or nonlinear changes in losses. (vii) Widespread geographical simultaneity of losses (e.g., from tidal surges arising from a broad die-off of protective coral reefs or disease outbreaks on multiple continents). (viii) More single events with multiple , correlated consequences. This was well evidenced in the pan-European heat catastrophe of 2003—where temperatures were six standard deviations from the norm. Immediate or delayed impacts included extensive human morbidity and mortality, wildfire, massive crop losses, and the curtailment of electric power plants owing to the high temperature or lack of cooling water. (ix) More hybrid events with multiple consequences [e.g., El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)–related rain, ice storms, floods, mudslides, droughts, and wildfires]. And those are just the technical risks; the market-based risks are considerable, as well.” x State Farm dropped 125,000 customers Randy Diamond, “State Farm Pullout Leaves Florida Policyholders Scrambling ,”PalmBeachPost,January27,2009;“StateFarmCancelsThousandsinFla.,” MSNBC, February 3, 2010, www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35220269/ns/business -personal_finance/t/state-farm-cancels-thousands-fla/. The state Office of Insurance Regulation calculates that more than half of the largest underwriting companies are running net losses in Florida. Their profit-making operations elsewhere are subsidizing homeowners’ insurance in Florida, which means Floridians are not paying the full cost of climate change in their state. xi The world burns 87.4 million barrels of oil every day Statistical Review of World Energy 2011, British Petroleum, at www.bp.com/ statisticalreview, p. 9. 246 notes to pages xi–xiv xi 9 million barrels of oil The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) estimates that 9 million barrels of oil found their way into world oceans from human activity in 2002; supertankers —the largest ships ever built, rivaling skyscrapers in volume—can hold 2 million barrels. Not all of the oil released into the world’s oceans by human action comes from supertankers and other shipping, of course; I’m just using them as a unit of measurement. Blowouts from underwater drilling contribute. So does runoff from land-based spillage and use of oil. The NAS estimates that naturally occurring seepages account for just under half of all petroleum in the world’s waters. This can seem comforting: nature does this to herself, so what’s the big deal with human spillage? But aquatic life has adapted to the natural presence of this toxin over millennia, and in a few short decades we have doubled the burden. And seepage from undersea vents doesn’t find its way as readily into sensitive coastal wetlands; our spillage represents a short, sharp shock to those ecosystems. See US Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service, “OCS Oil Spill Facts,” September 2002, www.boemre.gov/stats/PDFs/2002_OilSpillFacts.pdf. xii Little resilience in our food delivery system The food delivery system has inadvertent resilience in the form of waste. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that as much as onethird of the food raised for humans does not find its way into a consumer. See “Cutting Food Waste to Feed the World,” FAO Media Release, May 11, 2011, www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/74192/icode/. Of course that waste should be reduced. Increasing the food system’s efficiency, rather than its acreage under cultivation or the quantity of artificial fertilizers it uses, looks to be the least-cost way of feeding additional people, just as harvesting “negawatts ”—savings from conservation and efficiency in electricity production and use—is in many cases cheaper than building additional generating capacity . A realistic target, says one study in the United Kingdom, would be to halve food waste by 2050—leaving something like 17 percent of our food wasted. (“Synthesis Report C7: Reducing Waste,” part of the Foresight Project on Global Food and Farming Futures, published by the Government Office for Science, January...
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