Carbonate Surprises

Suvrat Kher, geologist, interviewed on the Reef Times
One excerpt:

Tell me about some of the “water crises” you’ve blogged on (like India) and why they are happening. 
India is facing a multitude of water problems. First there is the problem of water quality. Environmental regulation is new to India and is weakly implemented and that means that almost all the major rivers and lakes are polluted to unacceptable levels. Wetlands are disappearing through uncontrolled and unplanned development. Even an iconic wetland like the famous Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary is threatened.
Second is the impact of climate change on surficial water. If trends observed in the decline of Himalayan glaciers hold over the next couple of decades it would affect the summer runoff of Himalayan rivers that are a lifeline to hundreds of millions of people in northern India.
Finally there is the crisis facing groundwater. Unregulated extraction of this resource has lead to aquifer overdraft in many regions. This is a catastrophe in the making since groundwater irrigates over two thirds of arable land in India.

Economics and climate change

Today's Express has a piece by Mihir Sharma - the biggest failure of economics is not the finance theorists and their belief in rational, efficient markets, but is on climate change

we scoff at “exaggerated” future costs from warming. For years mocked as dismal killjoys by everyone else, we have picked on solemn, doom-prophesying climate scientists like the second geekiest kid at school sneers at the geekiest. A profession central to which is working out the cost of the opportunity foregone has a massive failure of imagination when it comes to climate change costs.


There are other examples of a deeply-ingrained fanaticism getting the better of common sense. Take the furore surrounding the Stern Report, a big cost-benefit analysis that argued acting now on climate change was economically wise.

But economists undermined the report politically by attacking Stern’s choice of the “rate of time preference” — how much we in the present value the future. In particular, they said Stern committed the cardinal sin of not using the rate at which the markets valued the future, because the financial markets are efficient about information like that. (Seriously. This is true.)

Arguing about macro-costs and benefits and growth paths won’t help. Get micro-economists on the job instead.