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

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

I can only repeat my basic point: the effects of climate change can't be quantified in this fashion, because the net result of climate change will be to make the biosphere less suitable for the continuation of contemporary human civilisation.

How less suitable is unquantifiable, because we can't predict with certainty the exact state of the new climatic regime which will predominate (how many degrees warmer, how much windier, and so forth). To try to calculate what resources should be allocated to dealing with climate change, in the fashion you suggest, would require the creation of an almost infinite series of tables in which one attempted to assess the relative value of dealing with a one degree rise in temperature, a two degree rise, etc., cross-matched for each state with various states of cessation of global ocean currents, each in turn cross-matched with potential new hurricane indices, etc cetera, et cetera....and then attempted to match each of those against a whole series of other issues to which resources could be allocated. Assuming this is even possible, it would be pointless in the long run because by the time the numbers had been crunched through the climate would have changed and the results of the calculations would be entirely academic. (See also the comment from johncoxon way below.)

The point about climate change is that it will change everything. In my view, to discuss relative resource allocations in the face of that uncomfortable fact is a serious waste of time and effort.