![Disaster-Recovery-Dilbert[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/disaster-recovery-dilbert1.jpeg?quality=83)
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Age, an Australian newspaper, complains that economists who try to model the impact of climate change, say by measuring the impact of heatwaves, and scaling it up a little for the predicted increase in extreme weather, are not producing a high enough hypothetical body count to contribute properly to public discussion.
Economists are out of touch with climate change
If economists are to help us deal with global warming, they need to start studying science.
In the debate over climate change, there is one group from whom you don’t hear much: economists. The failure of climate economics to make a difference in the public discussion about climate policy should be a concern for the profession.
Climate economists are just as worried as anyone about the prospect of global warming. A recent survey by the Institute for Policy Integrity found that most climate economists believe climate change is a grave threat. Most supported carbon taxes or cap-and-trade programs to limit emissions, even if these actions were taken unilaterally by the United States. The consensus view was that a catastrophic loss of global gross domestic product – a 25 per cent decline or more – is possible under a “business as usual” scenario.
But for all this concern, economic research has had little impact on the public debate. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that there is a disconnect between climate science and economics. This goes beyond the out-of-date forecasting models used by policy makers. Even within academia, research often uses bad science.
The first climate economics paper I ever read provides a nice illustration of this problem. In 2007, Michael Greenstone, of the University of Chicago, and Olivier Deschenes, of the University of California-Santa Barbara, published a paper entitled “Climate Change, Mortality, and Adaptation: Evidence from Annual Fluctuations in Weather in the US“. The paper tried to estimate how many people would die as a result of global warming. To do this, the authors calculated how many people now die from random temperature fluctuations, due to things such as heat stroke. They then extrapolated this effect using the expected temperature increase from climate change, and found the probable increase in mortality is small.
…
Global warming will probably kill people in a lot more ways than days of extreme heat do now. If the climate changes a lot, floods will become more common in low-lying areas. Hurricane Katrina provided an example of how a large flood can cause a lot of deaths. This has nothing to do with the mechanism studied by Deschenes and Greenstone – the authors just leave it out. If they had paid more attention to science, they would have taken more sources of mortality into account.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/economists-are-out-of-touch-with-climate-change-20160314-gnizta.html
The economists aren’t the only people confused by how a few degrees of warming is supposed to kill lots of people. In tropical Queensland, the Australian state where I live, which in rainy season is subject to violent weather extremes, a funny thing happened. When the government built the storm drains, the drain pipes they used are a little larger than other places where I have lived. That way, instead of backing up and flooding, the unusually large but planned for volumes of water from sudden tropical deluges are safely transported away from inhabited areas.
The high capacity drainage system doesn’t always work – planning mistakes have sometimes occurred, and truly enormous storm systems can occasionally exceed the carrying capacity of even Queensland drainage systems. But surely if such storm systems became more common, the drainage system would simply be scaled up even further, to accommodate changed weather patterns.
Most of the time, violent weather extremes are an inconvenience rather than a disaster, for regions with well designed and properly maintained civic infrastructure.
I thought the decline in deaths was directly related to improved communication and warning systems. Of course nowadays we build up shorelines and river flood zones, but that’s what economists get paid to estimate…. and we pay insurance for.
if such storm systems became more common, the drainage system would simply be scaled up even further, to accommodate changed weather patterns.
Ah but you forget the presumption of Climate Alarmism
“Everybody in future will be even more stupid than we are today”.
Is that possible? To infinity?
Yes, emsnews. As I write, the human race is evolving to function in fetal ball position and will soon lose the ability to walk upright. Chinese takeout will no longer be an option and delivery will be the only means of obtaining sustenance. You will have to leave the door unlocked so food can be delivered to you as you are curled up under the table in the corner. Tipping will go the way of the Dodo as humans will no longer be able to reach their wallets.
It’s grim, I tell ya.
..BUT, we will all have ” Safe Spaces ” to curl up in !
Wallet? How 20th century…
The Chinese Takeout delivery will be by robot who will sense and debit your iPhone account…
Classic advocacy reach
Economy 101 prediction: When no one lives there, floods go on without harming a single person. People like to live in flood plains (face palm!). More and more people are living in flood plains (face palm!). Damage is increasing because more and more people are living in flood plains. Flood insurance is a choice you make when you live in a flood plain. Plains like that have been underwater for long periods of time in the past, and will so again. When that time comes again, I will have my great-great-great-etc-grandchildren repeat my prediction.
Oh look! The same number of casualties as thermodynamic laws obeyed by agw ”theory” – Theory? BWaH HaH HaH HaH!
Leo Smith said on March 15, 2016 at 4:49 am
if such storm systems became more common, the drainage system would simply be scaled up even further, to accommodate changed weather patterns.
Ah but you forget the presumption of Climate Alarmism
“Everybody in future will be even more stupid than we are today”.
Of course they will be more stupid. Such is the outcome of leftist politically correct education systems.
This ThermaClimaEconoMegegdon nonsense has already been refuted in the historical record …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/29/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years-2/
Warmer and wetter = flourishing civilizations (Minoan, Hittite, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance) rising populations
Cooler and drier = Fall of empires, death, famine, disease, declining populations
All of the costs of changing temperature are on the cold side, while all of the benefits are on the warm side.
My favorite supporting illustration …
http://smpro.ca/crunch/GISP2Civil.png
… although the “Beer” label in the above has been misplaced. “Beer” should be placed 2000 years earlier, with “Domestic Crops & Ceramics”, as we all know that beer is the fundamental basis of all of civilization by virtue of the fact that Barley is always the first domesticated cereal grain.
The oldest known writing states how to make bread, but as an intermediary step in the making of beer… The purpose being to prove the yeast.
Beer is why civilization and agriculture developed. Egyptian records show pyramid workers paid in quarts of grain and beer. The higher skilled crafts got twice as much beer.
We could hunt and gather all the food we wanted, but a consistent supply of beer requires growing grains and standing by the fermentor for a long time…
Beer: the foundation of civilization.
Without it, chaos rules. See the Middle East for example…
My understanding is that bread was invented to store the barley in a stable form.
The short version of the history of civilization goes something like this …
Hunter gathers were collecting wild grains as supplemental nutrition, and barley is a fairly common grain. However, barley’s bitter taste severely restricts what you can make from it … even today, basically just soup. The theory is that somebody made barley soup, but then decided it was too nasty to eat just then, and set it aside for later when they got really hungry. Naturally, the soup fermented and beer was discovered.
Now humans really get interested in barley as “supplemental nutrition”, so they domesticate the grain in order to make copious quantities of beer. Oktoberfest is born right after the barley harvest. (Note that barley is always domesticated first, with grains like wheat and oats following much later.) For obvious reasons, the locals want to extend Oktoberfest to be year-round. Since the ancients lacked refrigeration or pasteurization, the beer had to be consumed soon after it was made. No problem; they built warehouses and stored the grain for year-round brewing, only to discover that the barley kernels have such a high moisture content that the piles of grain rotted before it could be used.
Then they discovered that you can make the barley into an unpalatable bread and bake it to dry it out enough that it will store without rotting. Dehydrated beer! Add water, wait for fermentation, and presto … year round beer brewing is possible.
At this point you have a settlement with farmers growing barley, and craftsman baking breads, brewing beer and building ovens, and others building, staffing, and protecting warehouses. And we all know that warehousing require accountants to keep track of inventory, so you have to invent writing to keep track of it all (when to plant, recipe for brewing, what is in the warehouse, who owns it, etc.) As soon as you have accountants – bang!, you have met the requirements of a civilized society.
Of course, that is the story as I heard it, and the telling involved the consumption of beer, so your mileage may vary …
The full history of civilization involves what happened AFTER beer, as knowledge and technological advances fostered the progression from beer to wine, and how the cooling climate took away that wine and forced the advance into whiskeys, vodkas, and other hard liquors; and how the evidence for that historical climate cooling has been preserved in the alcohols the western world drinks today. But that is a tale worthy of its own post.
@Thomas:
Nicely done. But I have a jar of whole barley from 2000 A.D. that has yet to rot. Dry grain keeps very well.
I’d add, though, that drying a wet harvest might well explain smoking grain and malted grains, found in early beers and later whiskies… One might well make the bread for both reasons, but in my experience, baked bread molds in days while dry grain keeps for decades. Damp grain in a sack probably needs baking…
Oldest brewery found on the Czech Bavarian border dated to the time it was also a Celtic border… Party at the border!! Something like 4000 B.C. while earliest Sumarian cuneiform tablet is said bread beer method. Egyptian pyramid builders paid in beer (we have the paymasters records of wage rates) so it was a world wide party in B.C….. party like it’s 1999 (B.C.)
Just what, pray tell, is a “climate economist”?
They will let you know after crafting the research grant program specs.
They might consider tapping Krugman. He’s certifiable.
Last time I read a comment by Paul Krugman:
“In the 11 first sentences I found 0 objective scientific statements and 20 logical fallacies – give or take a few.” – Ref.
I can´t imagine that I will waste my time reading anything by Paul Krugman again.
Has/would someone do a study to check the correlation between the increasing amount of grant monies for studying climate change and the number of scientists that are onboard with AGW. Is the money driving the results? I believe not even a congressman would be stupid enough to continue to fund studies the conclude all is well, no future threat. But a study that concludes there MIGHT be a real threat, and that more study is needed, it would just be irresponsible not to throw more grant money at it.
That’s like the people who try to say ”we just don’t know” how much Green House Gas Effect there is. Yes they do, they’ve all seen people calculate the planetary temperature of Venus without any green house gas effect at all.
Ric Werme posted some links to two different threads here and also to some other websites where people were showing how easy it is to get the temperature of the earth, or Venus – with no green house gas effect built in at all.
This is never ending alarm and income generating traffic, through press release by a media with nothing to talk about, and political activists posing as science media.
The amount of sheer manipulation of the public without even a nod to propriety in any of it: the so called science, the way the various movement leaderships act…
it’s a shame such pure and obvious dishonesty can float standing on the heads of citizens simply because one side is – basically a bunch of professional talking heads: and real scientific people have to go to work; and have real reputations to protect.
It’s definitely been the place in the internet where the bottom simply fell out of any hope for an honest broker in the whole mess virtually anywhere. Environmentalists and alternative energy peddlers simply deluge the media with fantastic stories, agree the whole world agrees with them, then expect people to not even blink.
The scientific world needs associations of scientists who speak out against the false claims and who can help each other but scientists are by nature individualists and do not care for herd behavior; hence their complete disdain for generating mobs to get things done.
It appears for the lifetime of most of the people alive in the early 21st century, the con men, circus barkers, and psychologists and geologists have simply bulldozed natural sciences to the ground in the rush to manipulate the world through press releases about fake weather alarm.
In the early 20th century one of the biggest forms of con men referred to were men who claimed they could make the weather change.
It appears it was all actually predicting what would turn out happening today.
Scientific discourse has been reduced to Bill Nye. Real scientists state their stand on things climate on Youtube because the entire public media mediated arena, is a farce.
Hopefully somehow scientists will come back into the public discussion; and the Bill Nye/Al Gore class ”entertainer scientists” will become a gladly forgotten part,
of a very, very nasty, era in our civilization’s
past.
So this writer’s position is that the scientific consensus of economists is wrong and should be scrutinized. Irony abounds.
Re. Economists & climate, 3/15/2016.
Prof. Smith (BS, physics; PhD economics) saying,
The problem, as far as I can tell, is that there is a disconnect between climate science and economics.
misses the great connection between the two: both share the many attributes of being, at best, academic, publish or perish, science (Post Modern Science). Climatology a la IPCC can predict naught. Economics as a science does exist, but expression of the total of economic theories (validated hypotheses of Modern Science) requires, I’d guess, maybe 2000 words, a folio.
For example, Pamela Gray at 5:47 am writes about the increase of people living in flood plains. Economic science predicts that very result, based on (1) government-induced decline in the standard of living (equality of outcome (for the proletariat-voters)), (2) the fact that land in flood plains is cheap, and (3) the consequences of freebie, government-paid flood insurance.
Smith doesn’t recognize that PMS made science ambiguous with MS, just as its daughter, climatology, did for global warming. It introduced GW, the PC abbreviation of AGW, which sounds just like gw, the certain, natural phenomenon occurring half the time.
Smith gives the British English version of an old saw, rubbish in, rubbish out. It’s worse than that. These pseudosciences take in good data, convert it to rubbish, then produce rubbish out. Just a few examples of that conversion are (1) Factor Analysis, the conversion of the objective to subjective, (2) differencing (differentiating) data, which removes the key first order relationships between data records, and (3) replacement of data with simulations, which can only reflect the subjectivity of the investigator. The process, good data in/garbage out, causes people to fill comment sections to overflowing with wide ranging discussions on the nature of the input data, which are both irrelevant and doomed to end up on the cutting room floor.
Smith says, climate economics tends to lag behind climate science. What does lag mean for purely political endeavors? These are directionless, dimensionless, measureless, irresponsible, unethical grabs for tenure, public moneys, and power, in that order.
It’s variances from the norm that kills people. Houston year in and year out, is a lot hotter than Boston, yet few people die during the course of a normal year.
However in both Houston and Boston, sudden heat waves can kill lots of people.
If the world gets a little warmer, people will adapt, normal weather will be dealt with and survived, and it will be the heat waves that kill people.
Climate change is slow moving MarkW – in the unlikely event that the heatwaves become more common, people will adapt, because that will be normal weather.
Preparedness can mitigate a lot of damage and save a lot of lives. California is prepared for moderate earthquakes, and seasonal wildfires. You can also prepare for floods, drought, tornadoes, and almost any other natural disaster you can anticipate: don’t build in flood plains, build storm cellars and water cisterns, stockpile non-perishable food, etc.
It really amazes me how often Warmist try to to tell experts in other sciences that they don’t know how to do their jobs, because the answers they get don’t match the Warmists dire and baseless predictions.
By the time the CAGW meme dies, will there be any branch of science that the Climate Faithful have not alienated?
Problem with economic models is they much like climate models. They do not project / predict anything with acceptable skill. Like climate models they are intended to help us understand what may change based on a limited number of variables. i.e. raise taxes and consumer spending will decline, raise business taxes and unemployment will increase. Using them to forecast Gross National Product is about as effective as using climate models to predict temperature change.
Both suffer from the same problems, there are more variables than can be modeled, more feedback responses than can be accommodated, and likely as many unknowns that can affect the outcome. In the end they will tend to produce the expected result due to endless tweaking affected by the users biases, not reality.
Figures don’t lie, but lairs can figure.
Where I live ( a suburb of Chicago) we get floods every couple of years, but the city is designed so it is an incovenience rather than disaster. The water floods parks along the river (no damage), fills up overflow ponds, and overtops some bridges, making it hard to get around for a day or two. End of story. No one freaks out.
Very entertaining responses here: some real belters from down under. You’ve really set the site on fire with this one. Good on ya. Makes my day. (Must get out more)
Eric,
Seems to me that their very first sentence gives it away, that is, “If economists are to help us deal with global warming, … ” – quite simply, NO THEY ARE NOT and NO, it isn’t.
Regards,
WL
‘The failure of climate economics to make a difference in the public discussion about climate policy should be a concern for the profession.’
It’s a profession ?!?!
What’s next, climate nursing? Climate software development? Climate criminal justice? Can we put “climate” before any discipline?
Is ‘con artist’ a discipline?
I guess “climate economics” would belong in the same category as say, Marxist economics, since it is based on the extremist ideology of Climatism. With Climatism, you get a completely whacko, upside down reality, and yes they have their own brand of everything including math, science, psychology, sociology, fashion, moral scruples (the ends justify the means), etc.
“The tools that you design, the financial structures that you develop, the blends that you are able to put together … all of that, in the next five years, will decide the quality of certainly the energy and certainly the quality of the global economy for the next thirty-five years, and hence the quality of life for everyone else for hundreds of years.”
– Christina Figueres – Unelected megalomaniac UN bureaucrat – UN climate chief
Seventh Investor Summit on Climate Risk
United Nations is exerting influence on the finance industry for their desired transition of the society.
The 2016 investor Summit on Climate Risk – Press Conference
The failure of climate economics to make a difference in the public discussion about climate policy should be a concern for the profession.
Pointing out that renewables don’t feed the bulldog hasn’t made a difference?
“most climate economists believe climate change is a grave threat.”
Well, duh! If you call yourself a climate economist, what else would you believe? We’ve always had a climate, but only recently climate economists. If you were a thunderstorm economist, you might see lightning as a grave threat. In this case, the worry wart concerned about economists not seeing glolal warming as a serious economic issue sees this as a gravy threat.
All I know is this past warm winter has greatly reduced my power bill. Wonder how much money consumers have saved because of warmer winter?
The article in the Melbourne Age complaining about Economists not pulling their weight in climate change policy discussions, in particular by not predicting economic calamities from global warming, was written by Noah Smith, an associate professor in Finance from an obscure US University (I think it was Stoke?)
The very same day the article was published,only two pages earlier, the Age editorial came out in strong support of carbon taxes to lessen emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal to produce electricity.
I pointed out the irony of this, given that carbon pricing derives from the theory of the economics of externalities first discussed in a 1920’s book “The Economics of Welfare ” ( no not the social welfare handout type but general economic well being of nations) by English Economist Arthur Pigou
Since then such taxes have been termed “Pigovian Taxes”
Either Smith or the editor, or probably both, are blissfully unaware of this contradiction within two articles in the newspaper on the same day -which either implicitly “showed” that economists were contributing to the public policy debate on climate change, or alternatively showed that they were not!!
This tells you a fair bit about the standards of the Age which these days panders almost exclusively to the inner city green left donkeys who go with their tribal feelings on most issues
Bashing economists can be expected to go down a treat with such greenies who tend to be both economically illiterate and innumerate.
Really that was the likely purpose of publishing this poor standard error -riddled second hand article from the USA.