Missing Climate Goals Could Cost the World $20 Trillion (technologyreview.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: There are trillions of reasons for the world to prevent temperatures from rising more than 1.5C, the aspirational target laid out in the Paris climate agreement, according to a new study. If nations took the necessary actions to meet that goal, rather than the increasingly discussed 2C objective, there's a 60 percent chance it would save the world more than $20 trillion, according to new work published this week in Nature by scientists at Stanford. That figure is far higher than what most experts think it will cost to cut emissions enough to achieve the 1.5C target. Indeed, one study put the price tag in the hundreds of billions of dollars. If temperatures rise by 3C, it will knock out an additional 5 percent of GDP. That's the entire planet's GDP.

Comments

This is the right approach

[swillden]

I haven't looked into this particular analysis at all, but this is exactly what we should be doing. Rather than making arguments that humans suck and are destroying life-giving Gaia, or trying to scare people with horror stories of runway warming, we should be carefully, rationally, constructing the best possible estimates of the cost of global warming under various scenarios, and then comparing them with the best possible estimates of the cost of various mitigation strategies, including not only cutting carbon emissions (which requires a sub-field of analyses to figure out the best and least impactful way to motivate cutting of carbon production) but also schemes to recapture carbon and schemes to directly cool the planet's climate other ways, such as orbital sunscreens to reduce insolation. And at the same time we should continue investing in climate and economic modeling to refine the estimates.

And we should act on the strategy that produces the best outcome, according to those estimates, even as we continue working to revise the estimates -- and adjust the strategy aprpropriately, in cautious, incremental steps.

This is the rational, Bayesian approach to the problem. And it's the right approach even in the (extremely unlikely) case that the warming isn't anthropogenic, or even if the planet isn't really even warming! Act on the best information you have, cautiously and adjusting for your level of confidence in that information, and keep working to get better information and adjust your approach accordingly. This is rational, logical, and the approach most likely to yield the most favorable outcomes. "Most likely" and "most favorable" are key words; there are no guarantees, but maximizing the probability of good outcomes is the the best way forward.

Re:This is the right approach

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume the whole scientific community is in agreement.

They aren't.

Go back 30 years, and start reading that predictions made then. Go watch An Inconvenient Truth 10 years from now. I once strongly believed in this, but to my left is a computer that is entirely capable of doing nuclear bomb simulation. I'm curious why there's never any models given that I can simply run.

There's also a lot more information available today, which makes it pretty easy to do investigation. For example:

https://darksky.net

That his historical data for every day, going back decades for a lot of cities. Go pick one, and start pulling the data... You're a competent scientific nerd I hope. I am, and I'm fully capable of looking at data myself. I just encourage you to come to your own conclusion. It's very easy to do. Data from some remote area can easily be faked, but not in some area where people actually live..