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

Money, sorry to say

[Tablizer]

It's time a climate superPAC be formed to create an NRA-like political entity with teeth. Science, math, and logic just don't work on the dumb and the greedy. You gotta bribe politicians with campaign money (or lack of) to get action in our society. That's just the ugly truth.

The other side will say the existence of a superPAC is evidence of political motivation over science, but they say that anyhow now. Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

Re: Global warming is a joke

[silentcoder]

ExonMobil believes it. In fact they have believed it since the 1980s. We have proof. Thats why they are now facing criminal charges in California for lying to the public when we have conclusive proof that their internal documents contradicted their public statements. In fact they not only believe it, they are counting on it. When they first started planning arctic drillimg they counted on global warming to reduce the arctic ice and make the arctic oil cheaper to reach first.

Wrong Term.

[zenlessyank]

Pretty tired of hearing the term 'Climate Change' and 'Global Warming'. I am pretty sure the correct term is 'Global Poisoning'. With all the pollutants we have been injecting into the environment for the past 600 years, and all the wars and human induced destruction it seems pretty cowardly to use those terms. It is time to take responsibility for mankind's stupidity and greed and clean this shithole up.

conclusions not supported by data

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

The most striking finding of the study, however, is that continued global warming will cause average global incomes to fall by approximately 23 percent by the year 2100.

Even if the correlations that the paper identifies are actually meaningful, they in no way support that conclusion. The relationship between temperature and economic productivity the paper finds only exists after normalizing for "cultural difference", "contemporaneous shocks", "country-specific trends in growth rates", and "non-linear effects of temperature and rainfall". That is, the "23 percent estimate" only applies if all these factors remain unchanged for a century and if there is no migration in response to climate change. Those assumptions are, of course, utterly bogus.

Of course, the correlations are likely not even related to causation, but simply reflect historical accidents and the preferences of European settlers and the agricultural technologies they developed. If other cultures had become globally dominant, or if you had done the same analysis at different points in human history, you would have reached different conclusions.

In addition, even if all the assumptions of the paper were satisfied (they are not) and even if the 23 percent estimate was well-justified (it is not), then from a policy point of view, the comparison that you need to make is not climate change vs. no climate change, it is climate change vs climate change mitigation, and climate change mitigation itself has a profound negative effect on these normalizing variables.

Re:Enough Already

[Hognoxious]

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".

Always? Tripe. Given that they didn't all predict the same thing at least some of them would have been close.

Now it might be down to pure dumb luck, and of course the difficult part would be - without hindsight - to work out which.

Still, your assertion that ALL predictions are wrong is a bag of knackers.