Climate Costs
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All scientists agree that climate change is an inherent part of earth's natural history, and more and more climatologists believe that the climate of the earth, as a whole, is warming. But will all the countries of the earth be treated equally in this process?

I'm Dave Thurlow, and this is The Weather Notebook.

According to Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and his colleague Timothy Mitchell, warming of various countries of the earth will NOT be equal. Over the next century, they contend some countries will warm by as much as 6 degrees Celsius; others will warm by 3 degrees Celsius or less.

Hulme and Mitchell go farther in their study to assess how individual countries may be able to support the costs of coping with the changes in climate over the next 100 years. The researchers calculate a ratio involving gross domestic product, population, and predicted warming; the ratio suggests the relative vulnerability of each country to climate change. Countries such as Ethiopia and Tanzania are projected to have available for remediation costs a mere $100 per person per degree of warming, compared to countries like Luxembourg, which, with less warming and greater resources, rates a more comfortable $8,800 per person per degree. The US comes in at 6,900. The global irony then almost all the countries which are most vulnerable to the burdens of global warming are those which produce the least amounts of greenhouse gases.

The scientific debate about the climatological impacts of global warming may be diminishing, but the societal impacts of global warming including the fair sharing of the cost of climate change among "have" and "have not" nations are sure to be the subject of very serious discussion in international forums for some time to come.

The Weather Notebook is supported by the National Science Foundation, with underwriting from Subaru of America.