[T]he longer that global warming is ignored the more intractable it becomes — a point made forcefully last week in a report issued by the British government. Unless the nations of the world come together to control emissions, the report said, we face the risk of “major disruptions to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.”
The report’s author, Sir Nicholas Stern, the head of Britain’s Government Economic Service, is hardly a scaremonger. He combines a strong academic background — Cambridge, Oxford, and the London School of Economics — with practical experience. After the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, he spent six years at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. From 2000 through 2003, he was the World Bank’s Chief Economist. Last year, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, asked him to examine the economic consequences of climate change and make recommendations for what governments should do about it. The report Stern delivered, at six hundred pages, sets a new benchmark for policy discussion.
Six hundred pages? Is a glimpse at page 69 any help in helping determine if we want to read on?
Perhaps. At least in the online version, page 69 is home to two graphs showing yield loss by high temperature in a cool-season crop (wheat in the U.K.) and a tropical crop (groundnut in India). The decline is pretty dramatic.
Cass Sunstein has a few comments on the Report here.
Of related interest on the blog:
Pg. 69: "Divine Wind"
A book for fans of "An Inconvenient Truth"
Previous "page 69 tests":
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale
--Marshal Zeringue
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