tildalunicorn on Maximum Truth

[tildalunicorn]

For those about to click the Bill Nordhaus link... a particular Steve Keen post on how applingly Nordhaus underestimates the cost - and how flawed Nordhaus' reasoning is is here https://www.patreon.com/posts/appallingly-bad-38048063

A choice point I would like to note

- Assuming most of the economy is indoor (including *mining* as it's underground...) and so won't be affected by the climate because it won't be affected by weather.

-- (not in the post but even I can see the flaw that if NYC and their subway keeps getting flooded, even the most climate insulated finance job would be disrupted - and building a higher seawall for 4C rather than 2C would be much more costly)

-- Even the example of clean room semiconductors - those can be affected too, by droughts that can be happening with increasing frequency https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/21161812/taiwans-worst-drought-in-decades-deepens-chip-shortage-jitters

Another one is Nordhaus assigning a continuous, quadratic function for GDP to temperature change saying that there are no tipping points within 300 years triggered by warming below 3C, citing a study from Lenton et al.

When Lenton et al...

- Specifically cities loss of Arctic summer sea ice, with warming between 0.5-2C triggering it.

-- Nordhaus justified its exclusion by saying Lenton et al marked it with only one asterisk * on a scale of 3, meaning least importance (compared to stuff like eg Sahel monsoon). This criteria apparently doesn't exist in the Lenton et al paper

-- (while Arctic ice floats in water and wouldn't increase sea levels from melting - replacing ice with water would increase the heat energy absorbed by the oceans, which can increase ice melts for other ice packs, and also weaken the jet stream with a warming arctic...)

- events that could take longer to happen - eg the loss of ice on Greenland, labelled as taking more than 300 years, take a long time to fix. If it is estimated that loss of all sea ice on Greenland will happen in 300 years, it's way too late to wait - eg, 250 years to try and fix it, because *the cumulative emissions from the past are still effecting this*!

-- therefore, at least *some* action would have to be taken now. Just like stopping a cargoship.

And also more broadly, Nordhaus dismissing the 20-30x larger estimates of economic damage climate scientists gave to 3C warming vs various economists as the climate scientists underestimating human adaptability. Essentially just assuming economy will return to a steady state, no matter how large the exogenous shock (even noting -2C from pre-industrial average was era when north half of US was covered in ice sheets).

I'm not saying it climate change will end our civilisation - even our business as usual doesn't reach the +10C preindustrial average (same change as Permian extinction)

But I want to note that something like eg +4C from preindustrial average

- is not the same as your current weather +4C --> the bell curve of temperatures shifts. What was once a skinny tail for heatwaves is now fatter

- is not just "we'll still have GDP growth, just lower". GDP growth at all would be a bold assumption, with that level of warming (even considering only how much agricultural zones would shift, ignoring all the costs on trying to mitigate rising sea levels).

-- People can change and adapt from exogenous shocks, but this would be a staggeringly large one. -2C (ie minus 2C) from pre-industrial average was 18,000 years ago, ice ages - ice sheets covering US up to New York, not minor by any means, so neither would a +2C change.

And as for the conclusion, that it's essentially better just to wait for tech advancements in decades to come(?), and do less now (because transitioning can be tricky), I really am struck by the "What if we create a better world for nothing?" comic https://imgur.com/up6yu

And the fact that the more we do now - on stuff that isn't so cutting edge - electrifying things, making electricity zero carbon - whether it be intermittent renewables and pumped storage, or nuclear - means we have more time - rather, more carbon left in a carbon budget - to figure out what to do with hard stuff - eg aviation