Climate Change Concerns: Can we afford our present lifestyle?

Summer is coming. Travel plans are being made. Back deck lovers will eat many a gourmet hotdog and overloaded cheeseburger.

Burp. Life is good.

Maybe too good.

Planet Earth is becoming a pretty expensive piece of real estate to live upon. Fire-, weather- and climate change-related events are coming with higher price tags than ever before. Should we be reducing our spending and saving for tougher times ahead?

Relatively recently we’ve read about Iceland’s volcanic eruptions delaying travel, fires in Alberta driving entire populations from their towns and homes, tsunamis crippling some parts of Japan, floods burying large parts of Australia, tornados flattening towns like Joplin, Missouri. The heavy personal and financial tolls of international disasters seem to be rising.

From Dec. 23, 2009:

“A report from the Center for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters noted that 224 out of 245 international disasters this year were weather-related, causing $15 billion US in economic damage.”

I think the Center for Research must have only been looking at specific kinds of disasters. According to insurance company records, international losses are staggering.


["We have a long way to go get environmentally fit": Mojo's runner]

This from The Little Green Handbook:

re The probability of global bankruptcy.

“Perhaps the best and the most convincing short-cut to the problems associated with studying the slow process of climate change and extreme weather lies in weather-related economic losses... i.e., the money we have to pay for weather-induced damage. These records are maintained by insurance companies, and it is in their interest to make them reliable.”

“According to Munich Re, global weather-related economic losses increased from $3 billion per year in 1980 to $80 billion per year at the end of the 20th century.”

(That’s an increase of $77 billion per year in 20 years. Pretty steep. Our years spent on the planet are getting dearer as I speak.)

“Losses per decade increased from $86 billion for 1980 - 89 to $474 billion for 1990 - 99.”

Though I have no records of economic losses for the last, most recent decade, and though not all economic losses were climate-change related, I have to assume global expenses went north.

It begs the question? Can Planet Earth and its inhabitants afford the way humans choose to live?

Stay tuned.

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