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Recent research suggests climate change will lead to troubling social and economic damages, including a severe drop in global GDP.
What will a planet plagued by escalating climate change look like? No one really knows. But speaking at EmTech MIT 2016, Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, presented results based on his recent analysis of economic and climate data that begin to more clearly define what the world might look like as it gets hotter.
It's not a pretty picture. Rising temperatures will dramatically damage agricultural yields and human health, and will significantly reduce overall economic growth. In fact, Hsiang said, data suggests global GDP will be reduced by 23 percent by the end of the century if climate change progresses largely unabated, compared to a world without global warming.
That decrease in economic output will hit the poorest 60 percent of the population disproportionately hard, said Hsiang. In doing so, it will surely exacerbate inequality, as many rich regions of the world that have lower average annual temperatures, such as northern Europe, benefit from the changes. Hotter areas around the tropics, including large parts of south Asia and Africa, already tend to be poorer and will suffer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday October 24 2016, @05:10PM
I'll happily agree that predicting the future is hard. There are all sorts of things that COULD happen, particularly when it comes to economics. We can never predict what sorts of opportunities may emerge economically.
That said, I'm NOT as inclined to go along with the skepticism about climate change in general that seems to accompany your argument:
The problem here is that the climate change mitigation advocates need this to be true in order to sell us on near future mitigation. If it's not true, then we don't have a case for mitigation. This is a real possibility given the tendency of climate models to overestimate degree of change, the cost models to overestimate cost of climate change and underestimate the cost of mitigation, and the tendency at all levels to outright blow off time value and technological change unless they need it for advocacy purposes. Once again, this is more like the hard sell of a scam than serious scientific or social discourse.
Here's the thing with such arguments. I'm perfectly happy to believe that there are extremists on all sides of an issue, willing to push an agenda. I'll also go along with the idea that there are business interests that are looking to make a profit off of "mitigation" efforts, and they're likely to want to skew the data toward them, just as the fossil fuel companies and those connected to them want to skew the issue the other way.
What I'm not sold on is the general "conspiracy theory" tone of such arguments. Here's the reality -- fossil fuel-dependent industries have a LOT of money. They have a lot of power, politically and economically. They're much more established and entrenched in all of these things than any business looking to make money off of new emerging tech for mitigation efforts.
So, really, if scientists and their models could really be "bought" as frequently as skeptics like to imagine, who has the resources, lobbyists, etc. to do the "buying"?? The traditional businesses. Frankly, one of the things that gives me hope for humanity and for scientific endeavors is the fact that >95% of climate experts have stood up to those folks and refuse to go along with the "skeptics" who have lobbied and invaded our government, who seek to skew media coverage, and who have managed to convince huge numbers of the general population to distrust scientists and experts. What possible motivation could such a huge number of smart people have to go against the big businesses who would happily fund research (as well as "research"), give them jobs and likely a public platform, etc.? If only they'd just agree to "fudge stuff" just a little bit. Or, if "reality" is actually that climate change is massively overexaggerated and firm evidence could be had to dispute it scientifically, these folks would even be looking at prestige in science -- they could present evidence overturning a collective social delusion!
Except most scientists don't seem to be doing that. I'm skeptical of the accuracy of models too, but I'm much more skeptical of those who'd claim that most of the models are severely rigged. The present discussion is about economic modeling, and as I already said, I think that's much harder to predict. But I simply can't understand why all of the scientists who are creating the models would voluntarily exaggerate their claims, when they could almost universally be more rewarded for exaggerating in the opposite direction. Even if you'd argue for an ideological bias within academia or something, you'd still have a LOT more defections to the "dark side" if a reasonable scientific evaluation of the data conflicted with the current consensus.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 24 2016, @08:39PM
What I'm not sold on is the general "conspiracy theory" tone of such arguments. Here's the reality -- fossil fuel-dependent industries have a LOT of money. They have a lot of power, politically and economically. They're much more established and entrenched in all of these things than any business looking to make money off of new emerging tech for mitigation efforts.
Unfortunately, there are two problems with this. First, it's yet another unsubstantiated conspiracy theory here attempting to taint the opposition with Exxon cooties. But the theory ignores t +hat whatever spending the fossil fuel companies do, it's vastly outspent by the other side. The World Wildlife Fund, the largest pro-mitigation NGO out there, probably receives more in government funding by itself than the entire anti-mitigation side spends (last I checked it was something like $30 million per year for WWF government funding versus $10 million or so per year for US-side advocacy groups, which seems to be the lion's share of the global propaganda effort). And oil companies in particular are suspiciously quiet. Basically, the Koch brothers are by far the most visible part and they're big, but not the largest players in the field. The largest players take pains not to say anything about climate change.
Second, oil companies, which is the big money, are still doing pretty well. While they're in a production glut now, they had record profits a few years ago despite climate change propaganda. The big companies may be doing better now than they would in the absence of climate change mitigation just due to the greater availability of public funds. My point here is that they're not one the side that opposes climate change mitigation.
Moving on, I wouldn't term my views as conspiracy theory because the shenanigans aren't covert. We have a variety of very open games being played with the research and models, groupthink in climate research, low hundreds of billions a year in public spending solely justified by current climate research, and ridiculous reasoning to justify climate change mitigation.
Let's go with some examples. Any research which supports climate change gets a lot of free publicity from the media, to the point that there are sites with hundreds of links [numberwatch.co.uk] to research which gratuitously blames climate change for some problem. In addition, there's an industry in research on demand, with certain researchers conveniently coming up with research as it is needed for propaganda purposes. Michael Manning is particularly notorious for this with the "hockey stick" paper (which not only was statistically broken, but self-approved for inclusion in the IPCC review of that year. He also conveniently coauthored a rebuttal letter [wiley.com] (published the very same month) to the "Stadium Wave" theory [springer.com] (by Judith Curry et al, Curry being a popular target of pro-mitigation propaganda) which attempted to explain some multi-decade variation in climate (the "Stadium Wave" paper had been available online for the better part of a year as a preprint). This allowed the media to immediately discount [theguardian.com] the original research.
Scientists continue to be ridculed and ostracized for consorting with the enemy (Judith Curry [discovermagazine.com], Freeman Dyson [yale.edu], Lennart Bengtsson [spiegel.de], and Ivar Giaever [climatedepot.com]). Vast sums of money are spent by governments throughout the developed world on climate change and technologies allegedly for mitigating CO2 emissions in some way and there's potentially big money in the carbon dioxide emission credit markets (the entire Eurozone has them and they've already had a multi-billion dollar scandal with the Russians and Ukrainians gaming [soylentnews.org] the system). Finally, as I noted there's five fallacies [soylentnews.org] that cover most climate change arguments, even those by researchers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:08AM
So, really, if scientists and their models could really be "bought" as frequently as skeptics like to imagine, who has the resources, lobbyists, etc. to do the "buying"??
Who is "buying"? The governments, of course. Most of these scientists and programs are quite open as to what their sources of funding are. Similarly, the primary arbitrator of what climate research is supposed to be, is funded by the UN.
Except most scientists don't seem to be doing that. I'm skeptical of the accuracy of models too, but I'm much more skeptical of those who'd claim that most of the models are severely rigged.
Why are they always biased in the same direction? I'll note also that this particular research of the article is intended to scare the Persian Gulf states which are not only some of the key resistance to stopping the use of petroleum (a key mitigation strategy), but also some of the larger subsidizers of fossil fuel use. How come we never hear of how awesome the real estate expansion will be in Canada and Siberia? Or the potential economic and trade benefits of the Northwest Passage? Any discussion of climate change is always about the drawbacks never the advantages.
Why has the IPCC never provided alternatives? They've only recommended holding the line at 2 C increase from 1850 and until recently refused to discuss adaptation strategies. That's a typical adversarial argument sell. Only mention the advantages of your desired choice and only mention the disadvantages of other choices (or don't mention them at all). Never provide a balanced viewpoint.