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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."
Per the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, in war, someone always turns a profit. Also, in peace, someone always turns a profit.
A shifting wind (if you'll pardon the turn of phrase) will always result in profit for someone.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
ExonMobil's internal memos specifically cite global warming caused by burning fossil fuels as the key to making arctic drilling profitable.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
I've always wanted to ask how robust major city seaports are in relation to climate change and sea level rise. If big cargo ships can't effectively dock at ports that are partially underwater, or the city itself is becoming flooded, that will cause commerce to come to a screeching halt. When are the seaports expected to become compromised? Sorry, this is a dupe, I posted anonymously accidentally and I wanted to get my name on this
How can one ignore one the greatest propaganda artists on the side that everyone keeps pointing to, until it becomes an Inconvenient Truth?
Here's the part that gets me. People love to spout off the incredible claims this guy makes, and then like a defunct prophet, discards him until it is convenient to call upon his name again.
This isn't science, it is religion. Pure Religion. They use scientific sounding terms and make bold predictions that have failed repeatedly, only to have the next round of prophets waiting in the wings with a better interpretation of their holy book!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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,
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.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
African Academy of Sciences
American Geophysical Union
American Chemical Society
American Institute of Physics
American Physical Society
Australian Institute of Physics
Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
European Physical Society
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Meteorological Society
European Academy of Sciences and Arts
European Federation of Geologists
European Geosciences Union
European Science Foundation
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies
InterAcademy Council as the representative of the world’s scientific and engineering academies
International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences
United States National Research Council
Royal Society of New Zealand
Royal Society of the United Kingdom
American Society of Agronomy (ASA),
Crop Science Society of America (CSSA),
Soil Science Society of America (SSSA)
Well, the list goes on and on... It would be much easier to list dissenting organizations: NONE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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.
-Styopa
Agreed. It's sciency not science, and could easily be categorized as a religion.
CAGW extremists are well known to lie consistently on wikipedia. Just like Cook's 97% consensus, they include anyone and anything that mentions humans and climate.
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/97-articles-refuting-the-97-percent-consensus.html
While you are at it, fix the brush fires from lightning in Africa, which account for about 26.3% of annual CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere.
Even if that were true, where do you think the brush came from? Digging carbon out of the ground and burning it is going to have a different net effect than extracting carbon from the atmosphere into a plant and releasing it back into the atmosphere.
You realize the U.S. is ~4.5% of the population... right?
Even if we went completely arboreal, and genetically engineered our children to have green skin and photosynthesize, it really wouldn't change the vector, regardless of which side you are on, and which way you think it points.
Fix the problems in China and India first. While you are at it, fix the brush fires from lightning in Africa, which account for about 26.3% of annual CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere.
Bushfires are part of the natural carbon cycle, that carbon was all already in the biosphere, and will become a part of vegetative matter again when the plants regrow. The CO2 the US produces is mostly from fossil fuels, which are not currently part of the active carbon cycle, unless you count time on long geological scales. Furthermore, the US is ~17% of global output. The disparity between population size and current pollution output is worrying, not just because of the magnitude, but moreso because others, like China, will seek to attain the same lifestyle. If China overnight became as large a per capita CO2 emitter as the US, global output would increase by around 30%. (Based on rough figures found by googling, page I saw had 2011 data). Given the standard of living in much of India, them aspiring to a carbon based US-level lifestyle would be even worse.
So how much do people expend on cold weather in temperate regions? I doubt it's 25% but it's not trivial. Think about seasonal clothing, transportation, heating and heating infrastructure, insulation, snow removal etc.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
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?
If we continue to pursue economic growth as a goal they will all increase. Economic growth is only possible if there is inflation as Adam Smith proved 300 years ago.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
natural warming doesn't happen on such a short time-scale.
It most certainly does.
Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years (e.g., Taylor et al., 1993). Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years. The decadal-timescale transitions would presumably have been quite noticeable to humans living at such times, and may have created difficulties or opportunities (e.g., the possibility of crossing exposed land bridges, before sea level could rise)
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projec...
it's in my head
It's already too late to do anything. Millions of years ago, the Earth was covered by forests. The trees died, as plants and animals do, and this was before mushrooms. If a tree falls in the forest, do mushrooms eat it? These days, yeah, but back then, no. So millions of years ago a lot of plant material turned into coal. We've dug up almost half of it and burned it. All that CO2, sequestered for hundreds of millions of years, has been released into the atmosphere. It took literally millions of years for all that CO2 to be sequestered, and we've released it in 150 years. No, there's no going back. Get used to it.
Plants LOVE CO2. If you take any modern plant and put it in a CO2 rich environment, it'll grow faster. Ask any pot grower.
Plants evolved when there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than now. We're going back to that era, because we've burned all the coal and oil that was laid down over millions of years back then. LISTEN: it took millions of years for that CO2 to be removed from the air, and we've put it all back in 100 years. THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES. It's too late to do anything. Politics be damned. Unless we start removing CO2 from the air (which costs money nobody wants to pay) costal cities will be flooded, coral reefs will die, and it'll take MANY THOUSANDS of years for life to recover. This is just fact. You already screwed us, thanks.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Atmospheric CO2 has never jumped as fast as it has in the past 50 years, so we're likely to see a mass extinction before things stabilize. So I think you're correct: life will flourish, eventually. "Life finds a way."
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Still, your assertion that ALL predictions are wrong is a bag of knackers.
Sure, occasionally people get little things right. But there are VERY few predictions of any real significance, and certainly nothing systematic. Sure, some wanker in 1915 may have made small predictions that were based on things they already knew about ("There will be more automobiles in the future" or "They will still use dollars" or "They will have better aircraft" etc.), or obvious ("They will still elect a President" or "Congress will still bicker"). and occasionally some writer would get lucky and predict one small thing, though he might get a ton of other stuff wrong.
But you aren't going to find any economist in 1915 saying "in 2015, the economy will be based on a growing service sector as manufacturing declines, with a strong focus on the online technology sector." They would have been way more likely to think things like the gold standard vs. free silver issue or railroad robber baron controversy would still be having some huge impact 100 years later. And they would have been completely oblivious to the effects of two world wars on Europe, or the Cold War, or the advent of the internet economy, etc.
Predicting what the economy will look like in 2100 is beyond ridiculous. There are WAY too many unknown factors to even begin to hazard an educated guess at that. One war, or one technological development, or one social movement could change things drastically in ways you could never imagine and completely negate all of your contemporary concerns.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Ever heard of "fraud" and "false advertising" ? Free speech does not apply to profit by deception.
Yes. I've also heard of Smurfette and chicken wire.
I'm not seeing how or whom against Exxon is committing fraud, or against whom, nor the product which they are making false claims about in advertising (I honestly haven't even *seen* and Exxon advertising in pretty much forever).
Can you provide a link to the court documents, so I can make sure that this is not just another Greenpeace filing "on behalf of Mother Earth", because if it is, they'd be pretty easy to distract by showing them a World Heritage Site that they haven't desecrated (yet) to give them something else to do.
The way you refute a peer-reviewed study is with better peer-reviewed studies. A spam list of unreviewed opinions all written by the same handful of dissenters refutes nothing. Provide better data, or take your unfounded opinions and baseless accusations elsewhere.
The way you confirm a peer-reviewed study is with more peer-reviewed studies, conducted independently and using different lines of evidence, to see if they arrive at similar results. Like this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, to cite a few.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?