Climate Change

[drplokta]

We keep seeing scary-looking estimates of the cost of climate change -- most recently an estimate here that it could be costing the UK £42 billion per year by 2080. What all these estimates have in common is that, while they look scary, they are in fact extremely small numbers, and indicate that we should do nothing about climate change.

Let's take that £42 billion per year by 2080 as an example. The UK's GDP is currently a little over £1 trillion per year. But if we assume 2% real growth in the economy per year over the next 74 years, then in 2080 it will be over 4.3 billion, and that £42 billion per year will be less than 1% of the economy, or equivalent to delaying economic growth by less than six months. Put another way, the effect of climate change will be to reduce average growth over the period from 2.00% to 1.99%, so it doesn't seem worth spending more than .02% of current GDP, or £200 million per year, to do anything about it.

Comments

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

But that only looks at the money. New Scientist published an editorial on the same subject and closed it with something like, "If conventional economics say that we shouldn't act on climate change, conventional economics is wrong".

[drplokta]

It only looks at the money because we have no other quantitative tools to use in order to judge the effectiveness of allocating resources to a particular course of action now in order to gain a benefit in the future. So the money is the only thing you can look at. You can only stop looking at the money when it gets to the point that a particular project is so overwhelmingly imperative that you need to allocate 100% of your resources to it, and climate change remediation is very far from reaching that point.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

climate change remediation is very far from reaching that point

On a purely technical point, climate change can't be remediated; its effects can only be mitigated. Even if (for instance) all GHG emissions ceased tomorrow, there'd still be another thirty years' worth of global warming to endure, because that's the time lag between the emission of the gases and their effect on the atmosphere. So whatever we do, there will still be (some) climate change.

In addition, many might disagree with you over your assertion that we're "very far" from having to devote all our resources to this mitigation -- an increasing number of climate scientists suggest that the tipping point, at which the climate "flips" into a new (but just as stable) state is perhaps only another few decades away. Certainly, many climate scientists seem to be converging on the argument that we'll be lucky to keep average global temperature increases to no more than two degrees by 2030.