I know it’s not global warming. Weather is not global warming. But here is the seven day forecast for my hometown of Santa Rosa, California: 106, 106, 106, 106, 95, 97, 91. Three days ago it was in the 60s and pouring rain. This is not typical weather for this place at any time. The truth is that in the last decade, this area hasn’t been getting as much rainfall as it normally did. I suspect that’s global warming. I suspect that we will be seeing more and worse heat waves because of global warming. That’s the thing about climate science. We’ve never been that concerned that average temperatures would go up by a couple of degrees. The big problem is extreme weather events. This five-day period of 100+ temperatures (yesterday was the same) will cause people to die unnecessarily. They don’t die because it is a bit hotter on average. They die because a two day heat wave of 99 degrees is now a five day heat wave of 106.

The other issue, perhaps even more important, is rainfall. Hotter surface temperatures will lead to more rainfall. The problem is that all that extra rain and then some will be falling over the oceans. Agricultural areas like my hometown will be screwed—as will all those avocado farmers in the valley. In fact, over the next hundred years, most of the really productive farm land in the United States will go away. Things are looking mighty good for Canada! (Not that they weren’t anyway.) Siberia is likely to become very fertile land as well. (The reasons for this are complicated, but the main thing is that carbon radiative forcing affects polar regions much more than equatorial regions.)

Of course, all of this is very directly focused on humans. We don’t really know what’s going to happen to the ecosystems of the world. There is little doubt that global warming is going to be great for insects. So there’s that. Whether it will be good for bees, specifically, we can’t say. And if bees die out, we are basically screwed. Or it could mess up the thermohaline circulation and then we are basically screwed. Or… We are basically screwed.

But what does any of this matter?! I mean, ExxonMobile only made $41 billion in 2011. What are extra deaths, the destruction of American farming, and the decimation of ecosystems compared to shareholder profits? Really: we have to have priorities and it is clear what those priorities are. After all, you start cutting into oil company profits and soon it is a Stalinist hellscape. Except it would be cooler than the world we are headed for.

Meanwhile, it’s still too darned hot:

In his column today, Paul Krugman argues that we need to stop worrying about the long term budget. Basically, he thinks the opportunity costs are too high. We are in no position to judge what policy ought to be 20 or 30 years from now. What’s more, legislators today can’t constrain what legislators in the future will do. But by focusing on the basically mythical “long term” we are wasting the opportunity to do something about the current jobs crisis. I am, of course, completely in agreement with him. However, he counters an analogy between the long term budget and global warming in a way that is incorrect.

Conservatives are keen to point out the supposed hypocrisy of caring about the uncertain long term effects of global warming but not caring about the uncertain long term effects of budget deficits. Krugman counters the charge of hypocrisy by noting that if we are right, global warming will be a catastrophe. That’s not really true. For one thing, the deficit scolds claim that if we don’t balance the budget right away it will be a catastrophe. The government will collapse in debt and old people will live and then quickly die on the streets. It will be Mad Max in our own lifetimes.

The issue (which I’m sure Krugman knows) is response timing. If it had to, the federal government could balance its budget this year. It could even buy back all of its bonds so it didn’t even have any debt. All of these things would be terrible, but the fact remains: we can fix any budget problem at any time. That is not true of global warming. The lifetime of a molecule of carbon-dioxide is very roughly 75 years. That means if we stopped removing the gas from the ground and putting it in the air, we would still have elevated concentrations for hundreds of years in the future. Unlike with the budget, we cannot “stop on a dime.”

Krugman brings up what I call the Social Security Paradox: in order to stop future benefit cuts, we must cut benefits now. That is the heart of why global warming is not like the federal budget. Doing something now about Social Security doesn’t do much for us in the future given that it is not at all clear there will be a future problem. (Also: if a real problem shows up, maybe we could address it with more tools than the usual conservative obsession of cutting benefits.) Doing something now about global warming will help us in 75 years. Once we release carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere, it is extremely difficult to remove it quickly.

The budget deficit is more like local air pollution. Once cars were prevented from releasing large amounts of carbon-monoxide into the atmosphere, carbon-monoxide pollution ended almost immediately. It helps that CO only lives in the atmosphere for half a year, but the bigger point is that the effect of the gas is local and they quickly move out of urban areas. For the purpose of the greenhouse gases, there is nowhere for them to go other than to be taken up into the soil or oceans. And that’s why global warming is so frightening: once it is clear there is a problem, mitigation is really hard. That isn’t the case with the federal budget.

Afterword

For more on this, see a short article I wrote last year, A Really Big Problem.

This afternoon, Steve Benen was writing about Obama’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. They sort of agreed that maybe they kind of ought to think about someday considering the possibility that there could at some point in the distant future might be an agreement that could conceivable lead to an arrangement that something really should be done about climate change in the not too distinct future, but perhaps the very distant future if that doesn’t seem politically viable. (Samuel Beckett would be proud!) Anyway, it’s good that they are talking about these things. You can be certain if it were a Republican in the White House, they wouldn’t be discussing it.

Benen brings up a common conservative argument against an agreement, “But without China, it will be useless!” Before I get to Benen’s comments on this, let me take a moment to talk from the perspective of a man who was in the trenches in the earlier days of the climate change wars. Many people at that time were really worried about Chinese air conditioners. It sounded then like it sounds now: American imperialism. We as in us, the fucking United States of America, are the worst polluter. Let’s take care of our own addiction to fossil fuels and then we can think about the rest of the world. As it is, if we acted alone, it would make a big difference.

So I have little tolerance for this selfish madness. Steve Benen is like minded. But he has a slightly different take on it. He writes:

I completely agree with him. What’s more, this is one of my big complaints about the United States. You see, I used to be a true believer. When I was in school, I believed all that shit about our ideals. I thought that we really did always try to do what was right. Those people who hated us just didn’t understand us. We stood for things! And I still hope. But I think that Benen and I are both being way too idealistic. No one in power in the United States is going to do anything because it is right.

Have you noticed something about winter? Every year we have really good jobs reports. People start talking about an economic recovery. And it somehow always evaporates by the time spring is in full swing. That’s what I thought when I saw that in February we created 236,000 net new jobs. Ain’t that what we saw last year?

Alas, yes. As Dean Baker pointed out this morning, last year we created 271,000 net new jobs in February. The year before that it was just less than 200,000.

I think we are seeing global warming in our economic data. The reason that the BLS has to constantly revise its jobs reports is that they create seasonally adjusted numbers. There are, for example, more construction jobs in the summer when the weather is good. But our winters have been quite mild the last few years. And this year, over 20% of February’s new jobs were in construction. If we remove these jobs (which isn’t valid, but it gives an idea), the number would be 188,000 net new jobs—much closer to the 160,000 jobs that were expected.

Don’t misunderstand: the jobs report is good. Hooray! But it is almost certain that the next couple of months will see bad jobs numbers because of the Sequester. The sad thing is that the economy is growing right now despite government austerity. The government cut 10,000 jobs in February. And now we are going to see even more. But even if the economy continued to add jobs as we did last month, it would still be after 2020 before we got back to something like full employment.

It is possible that under normal circumstances, this month would be the start of some generally stronger job creation. But instead, Republicans in Congress have decided that they are going to slow any growth we would otherwise see. So take a moment to appreciate our global warming February numbers. The rest of the year should have anemic numbers, and maybe worse.