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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."
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 *
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/...
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?
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.
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."