3/23/2006

Global Warming and Argentina

I found an article in Bonobo Land about an article on Bloomberg.com that talks about the economic reach of global warming. The article starts out talking about icebergs floating into the Buenos Aires ports. The issue isn’t that huge icebergs are floating around thousands of miles from Antarctica (where they originated). The issue is what caused the icebergs to break loose.

Using Argentina as a focus, the article went through and delineated the effects of rising global temperatures on a country. Argentina is a country based on an agricultural economy. The soybean and wheat fields in the center of the country are being flooded and ruined. The north part of the country is in a drought and the agriculture fields are drying up. Shipping companies are running into the issue that major thoroughfares are underwater. Most shippers thought that the roads would only be underwater for a season, but it has now been years.

It is pretty amazing to me to see how the higher global temperatures affect the world economy.

1 comment:

Dr. Tufte said...

-1 on Billy's post for bad links.

I can't say much about this without having read the source, other than the author of Bonobo Land is an Argentinian living in Spain - so he may be able to tell us some things we wouldn't hear otherwise.

The post and comments perpetuate careless mistakes about this issue. Global warming is a feature that may or may not be caused by humans. Anthropogenic global warming is caused by humans. The former is happening, we are unsure about the latter. There are two problems in relating them. First, as global warming periods go, the current one is not large. However, this doesn't mean it can't get worse. Second, the correlation between human activity and global warming is weak.

As an example of that, think about the post. It outlines problems with global warming in the southern hemisphere - which is relatively unpopulated and industrially underdeveloped where it is populated. If you want to call the items noted anthropogenic, you'd better have a mechanism in mind for: 1) the heat getting from north to south, and 2) the cooling in the northern hemisphere that would result. Think about it ...