This will be the first of my posts about the Stern Review Report.  (Living on Earth had a discussion about the Stern Review on 11/3/2006.)

The aim of this blog is to sort out the various ways human society and culture is going to (need to) shift, in the face of the shifts in climate. One especially interesting moment comes when it emerges that a few quasi-positive things will happen in the US as global warming gets going. (See the chart on page 57 of Chapter 3.) Essentially: for a brief time, yields for certain crops will probably go up, and winters will get milder. These effects will occur mostly before global averages have gone above 2 degrees centigrade higher.

Think about those effects. They seem to mean that the worst carbon polluter, with the largest amount of global warming skeptics, will have some minor positive effects at the beginning of global warming’s toll. As any quick look at the map and the distribution of people in the US will show, most people either live on the coasts — where global warming’s effect is muted prior to rising seas and if you can ignore hurricanes — or in the north-east and rust belt — where winters are usually nasty, and reprieve from the cold and high heating bills will be appreciated, by especially the lower and middle classes.

In a time when the US needs to be a leader rather than a complaining follower, it is not good news that some nominally good effects of a warming climate will be felt by people on the coasts and by people in the snow belt during the next 15 years or so.