Guest essay by Eric Worrall
An almost balanced description of lukewarmer views; I had to check twice to verify this story was actually published on the Aussie ABC website.
Are economists globally understating or overstating the cost of climate change?
By business reporter Nassim Khadem
In a blog written after the devastating bushfires that swept across his home state of New South Wales, Australian economist Steve Keen states, “I have to admit that I am personally not coping well with climate change”.
Professor Keen says he’s feeling the “same generalised anxiety about the future felt by Greta Thunberg and the young people she’s inspired to strike for the climate”, before criticising the work of William Nordhaus and other neoclassical economists.
“Since policymakers take what economists predict seriously — even after the 2008 financial crisis — they have been duped and have drastically underestimated how severe climate change will actually be,” Professor Keen argues.
William Nordhaus is a renowned American economist whose work modelling the economic impact of climate change earned him the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
He is not a climate change denialist. His view is that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities will have a negative impact and he’s urged governments globally to implement a carbon tax.
But it’s the extent to which Professor Nordhaus — and other economists who agree with him — predict climate change will impact the economy (and thereby the level of action needed to curb it) that has been the subject of intense debate.
The Paris Agreement goal is to keep global warming this century well below two degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.
At one end of the scale are Professor Nordhaus and Richard Tol.
Tol, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, has since 1994 been a convening lead author with the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Both Nordhaus and Tol argue that the world can survive a 4°C increase in global average temperature and the economic impact won’t be severe.
They also argue we shouldn’t reduce emissions too quickly, because the economic cost to people today will be higher than the benefit of protecting people in the future.
Professor Nordhaus told ABC News he was not available to comment, but has previously said that “optimal policy” would result in global warming of about 3°C by 2100 and 4°C by 2150.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-06/are-economists-understating-or-overstating-climate-change-cost/11929098
The article also provides a lot of space to arguments that optimistic viewpoints don’t account for predicted tipping points. But, well this is the Aussie ABC – they normally don’t bother presenting both sides of climate arguments.
What about the points raised in the article? I think the short summary is, without tipping points they’ve got nothing. A few degrees warming is like moving a few hundred miles closer to the equator – utterly inconsequential.
How consequential are predictions of dangerous tipping points? The problem with tipping points is they break the math, like a bad infinity inserted into an equation. If you postulate “at this point we all suddenly die”, you can justify anything, no matter how improbable, because the death of the entire world is something to be avoided at all costs.
Except we can’t live this way. There is a huge range of improbable but high impact events which could claim our attention, ranging from lethal global pandemics, extinction level asteroid strikes, nuclear war, an endless list of unlikely ways we might all meet our end. We have nowhere near the resources required to address them all.
And at least one of those events, the risk of a world ending lethal global pandemic, seems a little more real right now than the remote possibility a handful of scary but unverifiable climate model artefacts might actually be an accurate reflection of future reality.
Predicting temperatures and climate out to 2100 or 2150 is simply insane. On what basis is the prediction made? On the basis of current technology? 2150 is 130 years in the future, so lets go back 130 years to 1890. What was current technology then? Horses and carriages, intercontinental transport via steamships with journeys taking weeks. Telephones just coming into use with many communications still via messenger boys. Encyclopedia Britannica the latest word in knowledge dissemination. Computers, internet, aircraft, motor vehicles, mobile phones, nuclear power, communication satellites, global positioning systems, solar power, antibiotics, cardiac surgery, stenting, organ transplant and many many other things completely unknown. A prediction made in 1890 regarding conditions in 2020 would today be laughable other than in a science fiction context.
Can we have the least idea of what conditions 130 years in the future will be like. Lets make a few wild guesses. Nuclear fusion and/or thorium reactors will have been achieved, space travel to other planets will be a routine activity, climate control (especially to avoid drought or floods) will be established practice, world famine and poverty will be largely eliminated and with it large families, Earth’s population will be in decline, video conferencing will be so ubiquitous and good that meetings and discussion via his medium will be indistinguishable from face to face meetings; most people will work from home so far less travel. We will all have servants based on robotic technology. Manufacturing will essentially all be done via computer automation without direct human involvement. Mass production will have been phased out anyway with goods more or less made to order at distributed sites or with extremely small inventories. We will be extracting rare elements directly from sea water so scarcity is no longer relevant. Maybe we will have even learnt the secret of direct conversion of matter to energy and instantaneous transport.
Of course these are all blue sky guesses but they are just the things we think of because they are already on the visible horizon. What about the things not yet on the horizon which might also have become reality. Our technology and society will be nothing like what it is now in unknown ways and that makes today’s predictions meaningless. The only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that if real tangible problems arise (as distinct from hypothetical projected problems) they will become the focus of human ingenuity and at the very least the new solutions will be far better than anything achievable with today’s technology.
The predictions vary so all cannot be right. Can they all be wrong. Of course they can but some could be partly right. It is almost certain that all will be mostly wrong and most will be totally wrong. The future would be pretty boring if it was not often surprising.
I really like this quote from the post ” the remote possibility a handful of scary but unverifiable climate model artefacts might actually be an accurate reflection of future reality”
But then the current state of climate science has little to do with accuracy.
“The article also provides a lot of space to arguments that optimistic viewpoints don’t account for predicted tipping points. But, well this is the Aussie ABC – they normally don’t bother presenting both sides of climate arguments.
What about the points raised in the article? I think the short summary is, without tipping points they’ve got nothing.”
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https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-huawei&sxsrf=ALeKk00x-Qk9Xmg2OnKq8tYBdH8N7ekMTA%3A1582149845358&ei=1bBNXvO8FY_prgSuraKgAg&q=influenza+history+timeline&oq=flu+went+virulent+1600&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
Flu is a relatively modern achievement. Flu has not always been there.
Flu has developed towards us.
That flu can kill us is not intentional but a design flaw.
If flu kills us, it loses its host.
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So, next modifications sure to follow: no tipping points waiting at the next bend. Foreseeable.