Is global warming bad for humanity?

The recent farce at Copenhagen forced me to express in public, something I have always wondered about climate change.

• Is global warming bad for humanity?

Now we have been told ad nauseum that global warming will inflict terrible pain on human race and global apocalypse is nigh. I have a feeling that most of us have accepted this without questioning. May be it is time we did.

First let me make it clear that I am not one of the deniers of global warming. The scientific logic and evidence is clear that the earth is warming. The only difference of opinion amongst scientists is the extent & time table of this warming.

The fact that global warming will lead to climate change is accepted, and it is also amply clear that in the short run (next few decades), this will lead to miseries and suffering amongst all but the wealthiest of people. Some will be affected drastically like the people of Bangladesh and Maldives as their land drowns and they become climate refugees. Others will the pay the price in terms of higher food prices as the changing weather pattern plays havoc with the agricultural cycle as we know it around the world.

So it can be clearly said that the climate change is bad in the short run for humanity.

However from geological evidence we know that the earth has been much warmer before many times and also has gone as cold as to freeze the entire oceans of the earth in what is called the "snowball earth". The higher temperatures may be uncharted territory for human race, but the earth has been there before and from the geological evidence, one can say that life has flourished in temperatures much higher than what exists today. The dinosaurs lived in a time when the temperature of earth was probably a few degrees higher than what exists today, and it was considered a prime environment for life to flourish.

If the global temperatures were to stabilize a few degrees higher than today, then there would be many positives as well as negatives. This in the overall scheme of things after the dust settles and humanity goes through the traumatic change in weather patterns, may balance out and may even give us a greener earth!!! The Sahara would turn green and Greenland would turn green too! This may offset all the fertile land we may lose due to rising sea levels and change in rainfall patterns. After all we have to remember that the overall rainfall on earth would actually increase with a few degree rise in temperature!!!

So can we say that global warming is good for humanity in the long run? Not so fast!!!

I started the previous para with an "if", and it is a big if. We do not know where the temperature will stabilize. As mentioned before, this is uncharted territory. Human species has never encountered this situation before. All we can do is infer from previous geological era; but that can only give us pointers, the situation now is not exactly the same as in previous era so we can never be sure what the final temperature we will stabilize at.

Given this uncertainty, I would say this.... It is better to have a certain future than an uncertain one. To that extent we should try to hold on to what we have today and try to avoid global warming as much as possible. So global warming may or may not be bad for humanity in the long run, but it will certainly bring endless misery in the short run, and that in itself is bad enough.