Wet Water Shortage - How could a prediction of more rain lead to worries about less water? It’s something else we can blame on global warming. (11/8/01)
Climate and Disease - As our planet heats up, diseases once thought extinct, along with other diseases previously unknown to humankind, gain a foothold in temperate areas. Whats in store for the United States this spring and summer and how can we protect ourselves? (4/27/00)
Ice Viruses - Freezing is a well-known means of preservation, but scientists have recently discovered just how effective it can be. (10/21/99)
Fall means temperatures across the country dipping down towards the freezing point.
But as this ScienCentral News video reports, according to one researcher, it’s Jack Frost that makes a difference between poverty and prosperity.
More from William Masters, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University:
"Probably the most puzzling and most horrible problem in the world is that much of the world, really most of the world’s countries and most of the world’s people, haven’t had any economic growth at all to speak of. We take for granted the idea of progress—that year after year we’re a little better off than people were before. There’s about a billion people in the world who still have the exact same standard of living that they had a hundred or even a thousand years ago. There’s another 3 or 4 billion who have had some economic growth, but that growth has stalled. It’s really only in very few countries that you’ve had persistent, consistent growth of the kind we take for granted. And you want to understand why that is. Most people think it’s because of history and institutions that give people incentives, or don’t give people incentives, to invest and to innovate and adopt new technologies. We have thought maybe there is something else also, something in the environmental, particularly climate, that influences the ecology that people live in that makes it more or less worthwhile to make those investments.
"In the 1990’s people started to get a lot of data on world climate to study global warming. The International Panel on Climate Change produced a neat little CD ROM that has a ton of data, all sorts of things, and we looked specifically at the idea that it might be seasonality that matters the most.
"Clearly global warming will increase the area of the world that doesn’t get a frost. I think the areas of the world that do get a frost will still get frost but will be on average a little bit warmer—those areas may be much better off with global warming. It’s the places that used to get a little frost and it now won’t that might be hurt.
"In terms of public health I think [frost] makes it a lot easier for people to control infectious diseases. There’s a famous story of the great yellow fever epidemic of 1793 that decimated Philadelphia. Throughout that summer people left the city in droves. The city collapsed, essentially, until the first frost. People didn’t know why the disease was no longer occurring. They realized that the city was safe, they went back and rebuilt the city. Tropical cities had no such saving frost and ended up suffering from the disease until we invented yellow fever vaccines. We don’t yet have a vaccine for malaria, which is the other major mosquito borne disease affecting the tropics.
"There are exceptions to every rule. In particular if you are in the tropics and you don’t have the benefits of frost, if you happen to be a small island nation you can do pretty well. Singapore, Hong Kong and Mauritius are places that are able to control the public health problems, and they also don’t have much agriculture. They’re cities, really, and they have grown through foreigners coming in and building factories in which people work. It’s really only the places that are somewhat isolated, a little harder to get to, where people have to earn a living a through agriculture that have been handicapped in this way.
"Of course historically the more tropical south of the United States was always poorer than the north. It did catch up quite recently thanks to massive migration of people from north to south and vice versa, and also through a whole lot of investment from the original centers of wealth—Boston and New York San Francisco and so forth—down towards the south."
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