Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming Read Online Free Page A

Netherlands would announce that its famous Elfstedentocht ice-skating race might have to be postponed forever. Armadillos were reaching northeast Arkansas. Wolves ate dogs in Alaska. Fire consumed fifty million acres of Siberia. Greenland lost a hundred gigatons of ice. The Inuit got air-conditioning units. The polar bear lurched toward the endangered-species list. India’s Ghoramara Island was mostly lost to the Bay of Bengal, Papua New Guinea’s Malasiga village was mostly lost to the Solomon Sea, and Alaska’s Shishmaref village decided to evacuate before being lost to the Chukchi Sea. Canadian scientists reported that the forty-square-mile Ayles Ice Shelf had broken off Ellesmere Island and formed a rapidly melting island of its own. A European satellite showed a temporary crack in the ice pack leading from northern Russia all the way to the North Pole. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would declare that winter the warmest since it began keeping records, which was in 1880. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would announce that eleven of the previous twelve years were the warmest in human history.
    In retrospect, this was the moment that we began to believe in global warming—not in the abstract science of it, which most could already passively accept, but in the fact that there were money and power to be won and lost. Skeptics would continue loudly doubting the overwhelming scientific consensus, but they were a smoke screen. For those who considered climate change’s strategic rather than ideological impacts—militaries, corporations, the rare politician—it had become time to grapple with the consequences. There would be winners. There would be losers. The process of determining who was who was getting under way.
    Great Britain had recently asked its chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, to conduct a review of global warming’s likely effects on world markets. His findings were dire: The cost of unchecked greenhouse-gas emissions would be the equivalent of losing 5 percent or more of global GDP a year, every year, forever. In tropical Africa and South America, crop yields would drop dramatically. In South and East Asia, hundreds of millions of people and trillions of dollars of assets would be threatened by rising seas. “What makes wars start?” Britain’s foreign minister, Margaret Beckett, asked the UN Security Council in 2007. “Fights over water. Changing patterns of rainfall. Fights over food production, land use.” According to Lord Stern, the world was on the brink of an upheaval on the scale of the two world wars and the Great Depression.
    But the future did not seem universally dark. At the margins of the crisis, some were already seeing opportunity, especially in the wealthy nations that were causing climate change in the first place. At least in the near term in most of Europe, Russia, Canada, and America, rain will still fall, growing seasons will extend, and some agriculture could expand, bolstered by our emissions. Carbon dioxide is a key building block for plant growth. All else being equal—though in few cases will all else be equal—the higher the atmospheric concentration, the higher the yields.
    Farther north, in the Arctic, the ice albedo feedback effect—the fact that sea ice, which reflects 85 to 90 percent of solar radiation, melts to become seawater, which absorbs all but 10 percent of radiation—would help keep temperatures climbing at twice the global rate. Northern economies seemed poised to grow at least as rapidly. Canada’s farmers already had two extra growing days a year, and studies said its Athabasca tar sands might someday be accessible from the north, via the Mackenzie River. Under Stephen Harper, a country many Americans considered well-meaning to the point of naïveté was becoming one of the villains of international climate conferences. Canada was a party to the Kyoto Protocol, a weak 1997 treaty that mostly excluded big emitters like