Forecasting the Economic Impact of a Changing Climate (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Academic research has been busily trying to pin down how a changing climate will affect our planet over the long- and short-term. But a new study in the journal Nature attempts to forecast not the changes in weather, but the changes in our economy as a result of climate change. "The study (abstract) finds that climate change can be expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23 percent by the year 2100. This study is important because it solves a problem that has existed in prior models of climate change effects on economics: discrepancies between macro and micro level observations." Notably, the paper provides evidence that regional economies can be linked to global climate effects. "This modeling allowed them to examine whether country-specific deviations from growth trends were related to country-specific differences in temperature and precipitation trends, while accounting for any global shifts that would be experienced to affect all countries."

Comments

Enough Already

[Anonymous Coward]

Those stupid fuckers can't forecast next year's economic performance and they think they can forecast it in 2100?

Re:Enough Already

[NotDrWho]

If you want to see how well any given group or individual can predict events or outcomes 100 years into the future, just go 100 years into the past and ask yourself if anyone was predicting a future that looked even remotely like the one that actually happened.

Here is a hint, the answer is always "no".

And even when a lucky prognosticator does get occasionally get something right, it's usually either something pretty obvious or they got its context completely wrong. For example, a lot of idiots cite the Star Trek communicators as a "prediction" of modern cellphones. But this is way off:

1) The communicators used in Star Trek were more akin to military walkie-talkies, which had been in use for some time by the 1960's, than cellphones.
2) They were only used by the military. There is no evidence that civilians carried them.
3) They were short range. You couldn't use a communicator to just "call" someone anywhere.
4) Like walkies-talkie transmissions, communicator transmissions were apparently overheard by everyone (it's why Kirk always had to announce who he was and who he was talking to at the beginning of each communication). There is no evidence of characters making actual private one-to-one "calls" with communicators.

Model Uncertainties are understated

[BCGlorfindel]

So we have a very abstracted estimate of future economics that is derived from already abstracted estimated models of temperature. Sounds compelling...

According the IPCC's 5th assessment report in Chapter 9 models have problems with the TOA energy balance. Specifically if you look in Box 9.1 they say:
maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent
the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters
in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system
They follow up with a half dozen citations verifying this.

Read that closely because it is telling. Read the cited articles, and it's even more so. Climate models still can NOT predict TOA energy imbalance. To even get hindcasts correct, requires manual corrections to unknown or poorly understood processes like clouds. Let me observe that long term climate change driven by the greenhouse effect works ENTIRELY through the TOA energy imbalance and trapping more or less energy as gas concentrations change.

Forgive me if I believe we lack sufficient evidence and understanding to justify carbon taxations and other economic controls to try and rectify something we still can't even quantify,

Nonsense study, more FUD from the AGW crowd

[argStyopa]

The link to TAFA to RTFA is http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

Essentially they took the 'productivity' of countries, mapped them against average temperature, and then turned it around making that predictive. Utter nonsense.

According to their method, since the most productive industrial countries are all temperate, then warming will turn Germany economically into Italy and Italy into, I guess, Somalia?

Sure, THAT is likely to happen. How is this substantially different from the "warmer latitudes evolve lazier people" meme from the early 20th century? I thought we'd moved on from deterministic racism like that, or is it ok as long as it's cloaked in Global Warming fear?

Any purported 'economic' analysis of warming that doesn't see ANY mitigatory factors is more religion than science. To wit:
- even warming-convinced climatologists admit that the impact of warming on rainfall patterns is nearly impossible to anticipate. Warming will most certainly increase the evaporate take-up into the atmosphere from the 70%+ surface that's water, and that water has to fall somewhere.
- warming will shift optimal growing belts toward the poles, and vegetation growth has a warmth-bias; that is, there is a temperature floor for farming, but (as long as there's adequate water) not really a ceiling. So contraction of the too-cold biomes around the poles will net-increase the arable productive farmland on earth (not that we're actually short of food today anyway, but that's another point). Plants prefer warmth, and more CO2 is also beneficial for them. Not to mention that optimal-agri-zones will shift poleward, into 'fresh' farmland that wasn't previously as intensively farmed.
- on a more human scale, melting will open the arctic to regular transit, significantly reducing shipping costs from E Asia to Europe and all but obviating the Panama Canal chokepoint, this will likely cut transport costs for a host of goods.

I'm NOT saying that warming won't be a net-bad; inundation will badly affect a humanity that largely sited its preferable living places along coasts. (Of course, given a long enough timeframe they were doomed anyway.) But I see nothing in that study that recognizes or attempts to calculate *any* beneficial countereffects of warming. To deny that there will be *some* is at best histrionics, at worst simple mendacity.

Re:You realize the U.S. is ~4.5% of the population

[CaptainLard]

True American exceptionalism at its best! Can't someone else do it? You can tell America is a world leader because the government knows how to back down from a problem when another country might disagree in some way.

The "but China pollutes" argument is about the same as a 3 year-old whining that they have to walk when the 18 month old sibling gets to be carried by mommy. If America thinks its a world leader than perhaps we should fucking lead something other than pet wars where we supply ~95% of the "coalition" soldiers. If we put some effort into reducing emissions, China can just steal it fixing the two biggest CO2 polluters in one shot.

And you realize the US accounts for ~15% of yearly gobal emissions and something like 40% of all CO2 emissions since 1970 right?

Re:Is Al Gore redistributing his wealth???

[CaptainLard]

I know right, its not like 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have come in the past 10 years. Only 7 of 10 have been in the past 10 years, to get the other two you'd have to go back a full 13 years ago! Clearly those predicting warming have failed because they underestimated how much everyone likes to split hairs.