I was just reading a fascinating article on the economics of global warming when I was blown away by this quote:

WN: The world, you write, needs more economists who think like ecologists. Please explain.

Brown: One of the most interesting manifestations of realizing this at the government level came in China in the summer of 1998, when there was extensive flooding in the Yangtze River basin. It went on for weeks and weeks.

It eventually caused $30 billion worth of damage, which is roughly the value of the annual rice harvest in China. This was a big hit on the economy. After some weeks of this, the government held a press conference in Beijing. And they said we’ve been saying this is an act of nature, and that’s true. But we’ve now determined that there’s a human contribution to this. And they then said they were going to ban all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River basin. They soon thereafter extended it to the entire country. They justified it in economic terms, and they said the value of trees standing is three times the value of trees cut. And what they were recognizing is that the flood-control services provided by forests are three times as valuable to society as the timber in those trees. In a sense, that’s what the world needs to see.

To me, this seems like a direct parallel to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. Decades of river engineering and levy building destroyed most of the wetlands and barrier islands in the delta protecting the city. The short-term economic benefit of more and more urban development was never weighed against the long-term cost of destroying significant portions of the protective ecosystem. It is easy to look at a forest and just see trees when there’s money to be made in a booming real estate market. It makes me wonder if it is truly wise for our government to be encouraging people to move back into the region en masse.

The article overall discusses the “hidden costs” associated with global warming and how the interviewee came up with the $11 figure for a gallon of gas. It makes perfect sense if you believe the recent UK Report and/or NASA Scientists==

Even if you’re oblivious to global warming and oil prices, the article has a lot of interesting information about China that you might not know. The interviewee is Lester R. Brown and if you read his short biography, it seems he is well-qualified in what he is talking about.

Update: An article in Scientific American was just put out covering a new climate model from of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder that predicts ocean levels to rise 20 feet as a result of our current CO2 concentrations. No date is mentioned, but previous models showed that the most the ocean could rise would be 3-4 feet. The previous models were based only on speculations in the amount that ice would be converted into water. As it turns out, paleoglacial data shows that ocean levels were about 20 feet higher than they are today 130,000 years ago when CO2 levels were just a bit lower than they are today.