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

Re: commentary grossly misleads readers

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for a minor reality check, floating ice displaces exactly the same volume of water that it would occupy if melted and brought to the same temperature as the water it displaces; however, the majority of the ice in the Antarctic and other locations like Greenland are on land, where the melting would drain water into the oceans, causing sea level rise.