Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
long delays in melting the giant ice sheets. The long delays pose special
challenges because they require envisioning the shape of our landscape
and societies deep into the future and taking steps today that will pro-
duce most of their benefi ts well beyond the present century.
THE FUZZY TELESCOPE: ENVISIONING FUTURE SOCIETIES
As a boy, I loved high-powered telescopes. I once bought a cheap
one that was advertised as twenty power. When it arrived, I was crest-
fallen. While I could see Sandia Peak off in the distance, it was fuzzy
and distorted.
I call this the fuzzy telescope problem. In the current context, the
further we look into the future for economic, social, and political calcu-
lations, the more things look fuzzy and uncertain. So before beginning
my substantive discussion of SLR, I pause to consider the fuzzy telescope
problem. This causes severe diffi culties for analyses of climate-change im-
pacts because it requires us to consider the impact of climate change on
human societies that have already evolved for decades or even centuries.
To grasp the diffi culty of this task, imagine your hometown around
1910 and think of all the changes since then. My hometown of Albu-
querque had just seen its fi rst railroad. The United States had no central
bank, no income tax, and no airplanes. The most advanced computa-
tional device was the Monroe Calculator, which could perform about
three operations per second, compared to the computer I am now using,
which works 1 trillion times faster. Wages in the United States were
about 19 cents an hour. Social networks were built over your back fence.
Look at a map for 1910. Europe was under the thumb of three now-
defunct regimes: the Ottoman, Czarist, and Austro-Hungarian empires.
Virtually the entire African continent was divided into colonies under
the control of Belgium, France, Britain, and Germany. The nuclear
model of the atom had not yet been discovered. Scientists did not know
how traits were transmitted from parents to children.
You can see how daunting is the task of trying to project the impact
of global warming on the world of 2110. In areas where models rely pri-
marily on fundamental physical laws, we can be reasonably certain about
our estimates. For example, if we are confi dent about our temperature
