Some like it hot, but not one economics professor.
For the past 25 years, Economics Professor Gary Yohe has been working to understand and find solutions to global climate change.
“I do it for scholarly reasons,” said Yohe. “As a scholar it is an enormously productive thing to do. I publish papers with colleagues from around the world. I also think it is really important. I would like to see my grandchildren inhabit a healthy planet.”
Over the last ten years, Yohe wrote a paper with an ecologist on the observed effects of climate change on the flight patterns of a species of butterfly. Yohe discovered that over the years the butterflies gradually migrated north and to higher altitudes in order to remain in their preferred temperature range.
Although some scholars remain unconvinced of the existence of human-induced global warming, Yohe said that skeptics ignore considerable amounts of environmental research.
“Recent events and observations make it harder and harder to claim climate change does not exist,” Yohe said. “An example is the collapse of the thermohaline circulation, also known as the Gulf Stream. The intensity of the circulation is weakened as temperature is warmed. There has been a recent paper saying that the thermohaline circulation has weakened by fifteen percent, but we’re in a natural period where it should be getting stronger. We know there is an equilibrium without the Gulf Stream, but we have no idea what that entails.”
One solution to climate change that Yohe advocates is a mandatory increase in the price of burning carbon, including gasoline and heating homes, starting at around $10 per ton of carbon and increasing every few years by a set rate. Yohe claims that if the government raised the cost of fossil fuels, then the business community would take that into account when making long-term investment decisions. According to Yohe, the sooner such policies are implemented, the more effective they could be.
“The analogy is driving down a highway and seeing your exit coming up,” Yohe said. “You have two choices. One is to slow down and get in the right lane to safely pull off the road. The other is to stay in the left lane until you suddenly reach the exit and you risk having a severe accident. We are definitely in the left lane!”
Yohe also encourages students to read critically about the subject of climate change and think about ways to conserve energy.
“Professionally, the hardest sell is to get people out of their cost-benefit frame of mind,” Yohe said. “Given that the science is uncertain and evolving, people do the cost-benefit analysis and look at the uncertainty and say, ‘let’s wait to do anything.’ It’s hard to put that aside and look at this as a risk-management problem. In that context uncertainty becomes a reason to do something rather than not to do something. The biggest challenge economists face is to convince people that uncertainty is a reason to act.”
In addition to his research, Yohe is currently working on a chapter entitled “Perspectives on Sustainable Development and Climate Change” for the Fourth Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme, the IPCC evaluates human-induced climate change and its consequences in regular assessment reports. The Fourth Assessment Report is due to be released in 2007.
“What we envision is to project climate change for various possible futures and highlight the most vulnerable countries,” Yohe said. “’Vulnerable’ is having a high exposure to changes in climate and a low capacity to adapt. The ability or capacity to adapt to climate change depends on a lot of economic parameters: per capita income, income distribution, ability to spread risks, and markets, which respond very well to stresses.”
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