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Prevailing economic research anticipates the burden of climate change falling on hot or poor nations. Some predict that cooler or wealthier economies will be unaffected or even see benefits from higher temperatures.
However, a new study co-authored by researchers from the University of Cambridge suggests that virtually all countries—whether rich or poor, hot or cold—will suffer economically by 2100 if the current trajectory of carbon emissions is maintained.
In fact, the research published today by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that—on average—richer, colder countries would lose as much income to climate change as poorer, hotter nations.
Under a "business as usual" emissions scenario, average global temperatures are projected to rise over four degrees Celsius by the end of the century. This would cause the United States to lose 10.5% of its GDP by 2100—a substantial economic hit, say researchers.
Canada, which some claim will benefit economically from temperature increase, would lose over 13% of its income by 2100. The research shows that keeping to the Paris Agreement limits the losses of both North American nations to under 2% of GDP.
Researchers say that 7% of global GDP is likely to vanish by the end of the century unless "action is taken". Japan, India and New Zealand lose 10% of their income. Switzerland is likely to have an economy that is 12% smaller by 2100. Russia would be shorn of 9% of its GDP, with the UK down by 4%.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @06:58AM (20 children)
I try to avoid using such terms, but none other fit. Not only trying to predict the GDP in 80 years, but to predict a specific percent impact of a specific event, down to a tenth of a percent, and definitively declare as such? When we can't even predict such things to anywhere near that precision on even much smaller time scales?
Papers like this are a large part of the reason why I've gradually shifted away from caring about climate change. It feels like anxious-to-publish 'scientists' are happy to take a model, knowing full well it's not only incomplete but flawed and incapable of even accurately predicting its own training data (e.g. - the countless times in history when temperature:co2 correlation breaks down), and then declare it the all-seeing-eye. And now let's pair this with economics which is probably the greatest example of a pseudo-science in modern times. Stupid, that's the only word that's appropriate here.
(Score: 5, Informative) by qzm on Monday August 26 2019, @07:04AM (3 children)
Unfortunately pretty much this.
However they get a great reception at symposiums and conferences, and are easy to get published.. so...
They basically take the output of a bunch of iterative unproven models (and if you dont know why iterative models are high risk, then you should find out.. hint: errors accumulate) and they use them in economic models, which are generally accepted to be of zero value (otherwise the people who have them would be fabulously rich by now).. and conclude... what exactly?
But, they get published, and cited, so they get to keep their jobs, and fly away to a few more nice conferences.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is sinking faster under the current economic lies than any 80 year prediction could ever achieve (2% inflation? really? I wonder why my static cost of living is increasing by closer to 15%.. must just be me)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 26 2019, @01:09PM (2 children)
Not saying the predictions are wrong, but these are the kinds of conclusions that are amplified by certain interest groups: CALL TO ARMS, WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER!!!
Since all the predictions are basically more noise than signal, the ones that get promoted and circulated are the ones that line up with what the promoters and circulators want to say...
But, fear not, life will go on - somehow. Things looked mighty bleak in 1965, probably worse in early 1945, worse still in 1930, and if you get back into the 1800s and before, things really were pretty bleak compared to modern life. Doom and gloom run in cycles, this particular cycle may indeed have a really low bottom, but likely not as low as the most dire predictions make it out to be.
Now, as for the "going nowhere but up" trajectory of US prosperity post WWII, yeah, that peaked a while ago, and IMO, we missed our first opportunity for escape velocity in the 1970s, and the last one somewhere in the 1990s. We're coming down, the only question is how far.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 27 2019, @12:30AM (1 child)
> Since all the predictions are basically more noise than signal ...
These predictions are *non-testable*. Even if they predict an absolute value for the futur GDP, then there's no way to know what it would have been. And I'm sure they're not even doing that, they're just Chicken-Lickenning ("Little") what's nothing more than a magic number, usable for little more than chanting.
Om-percent, that's my prediction.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Reziac on Tuesday August 27 2019, @03:15AM
In the Actual Paper, I got as far as "using a stochastic growth model" and concluded it was congealed bullshit. "Stochastic" means essentially "randomly determined". They go on to say, " deviations of temperature and precipitation from their historical norms." So, which historical norms? the Roman Warm Period, or the Little Ice Age? Now, which one produced more human prosperity, especially in regions with a lot of subsistence agriculture??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 26 2019, @07:15AM (8 children)
Modded up for visibility. Not only do these climate people claim to be experts on weather and climate and such. They are trying to dislodge all the psychics and other nutjobs who make meaningless predictions based on nothing. How many Gypsy women with crystal balls have been put out of work with this nonsense?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @07:53AM (7 children)
What is the next thing you will say? How nuclear scientists claim to be experts in nuclear things? Or how engineers claim to be experts in engineering things? Or how plumbers claim to be experts with the pipes?
This is like a dentist telling you that it will cost a fuckton more and will never be the same if you ignore that toothache because you'll lose your tooth, but you say "fuck you! you have a crystal ball or something?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @08:10AM
I have the Theoretical Degree in Physics!
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 26 2019, @08:11AM
2019 (current year) minus 80 = 1939. Hey, isn't that like, sometime real close to the Second World War? And, like, Hitler, and Mussolini, and stuff like Pearl Harbor, and the Invasion of Poland?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by DeathMonkey on Monday August 26 2019, @05:23PM (4 children)
Yes, that about sums it up. Conservatives are opposed to all expertise now.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday August 26 2019, @05:51PM (3 children)
I think many people -- left, right, and center -- are often skeptical about experts because time has shown that a not insignificant amount of expertise is ideologically driven. One of the risks of making everything political (like ejecting people of certain political affiliations from restaurants as an example), is that everything becomes tribal, including science and once science is ideological/tribal, it isn't science. It is propaganda. No side is innocent of this sin.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by DeathMonkey on Monday August 26 2019, @06:41PM (2 children)
That's some grade A "both sides" bullshit. In a CLIMATE CHANGE thread you're going to claim that science denial is equally distributed?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday August 26 2019, @07:21PM
Yes. Once you go tribal you must accept the consequences which are primarily, being distrusted. I personally tend to think that at least some of the climate change we are seeing is human generated. I don't think it will be the end of the world however. If people are one thing, it is adaptable. The world will change, perhaps for the worst and many may die, but the human species isn't going extinct any time soon -- we've managed to survive in every climate zone from the Arctic to the Sahara, and it will continue to be so. The "end is nigh!" hyperbole on this topic is really over the top. Honestly, if NY City goes the way of Atlantis, it actually is not the end of the world (and this is true whether you are sad to see it sink into the mud, or glad).
As for Democrats and tribal research, the gun control debate is your albatross.
(Score: 4, Touché) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 27 2019, @12:37AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @07:48AM (4 children)
You know, it's rather dumb to comment on things you don't understand. You can predict *relative* affect on things without knowing the *absolute*. Like you know, if you are heading for a wall and don't break now, the crash is going to be 3x larger. You will still crash, but maybe you can keep your car now. Not so in the future.
You can figure out the cost of mitigations that is spent now and extrapolate it based on what temperature will be in the future. In industry, that is done all the fucking time. And then they always underestimate it anyway, because nothing can possibly go wrong with a mitigation (like dikes around Neatherlands ....)
And that's when I stopped carrying about your response. I didn't you were one of the 0.01% experts that knows better than the people in the fucking field. Maybe next time argue with cancer diagnosis how the doctors know fuck all about treating cancer.
Exactly.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @08:36AM
But, you chose to comment anyway.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @09:19AM
1939 was 80 years ago. What percent of the GDP do you reckon they thought would be driven by internet based companies? How about manufacturing? I'm sure you see the point. Relative or absolute is no less absurd my boorish friend.
Similarly the issue I mentioned is one that climatologists are well aware of, but one that is not covered by our sensationalizing media, which in turn results in less general knowledge of such issues. There are numerous climate anomalies and these are periods where the climate changed, sometimes dramatically, for reasons that are not clear. One of the more recent is the medieval warm period. Over a period of about 350 years starting toward the mid of the 900s there was a rapid warming event. This event was initially thought to be local, but recent evidence is increasingly indicating it was global. In most areas the temperature rose above late 20th century baselines. In some specific regions (including north america), it was warmer then than even today. This is extremely relevant in either case as this paper talks about region specific impact.
The biggest issue with these warming periods is we have no idea what causes them, or stops them. They are not driven by CO2 levels though CO2 does tend to increase following these events due to typical feedback effects such as the melting of ice that was previously trapping CO2. If you run modern climate models on the periods prior to the anomalies, they all fail to predict such because they are all fundamentally driven by a correlation between CO2 and temperature. When that correlation fails to hold, which it often has, the models also fail.
These sort of issues are not given the concern that they deserve. When Newtonian physics failed in the slightest way, Mercury's real orbit being off its predicted orbit by literally 1/100th of a degree per century, it was a major problem in physics for centuries. By contrast when we know that modern climatic completely are completely broken, we mostly just handwave it away or retrofit the narrative of failures. For instance the IPCC climate paper provided numerous tiers of predictions in 1990. Our warming has fallen well below their 'best' model, and indeed is at the very bottom of the 'low' scale. Why so little warming compared to what was expected? Who knows. And now increasingly often papers and article instead simply surmise the past as 'falling within IPCC prediction ranges.' True, but grossly misleading. Is the idea to inform or to persuade?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @12:50PM
then whichever shit happens with the climate, will be the very least of problems afflicting the luckless wretches ill-fated to be alive at the time.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday August 26 2019, @08:35PM
For your vehicle crash example, you have to know the details to know how much worse it would be without breaks. Will the airbags deploy? Are people wearing seatbelts? Is the vehicle on ice where the breaks are ineffective?
Details matter if you want to predict 3x worse.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @09:11AM
they're talking about trends and averages.
these can be predicted with good confidence.
climate predictions are fairly accurate, and you're welcome to investigate them in detail.
and climate does control GDP: how much energy do you have; how much energy do you need to produce things, move things around, etc. this does depend on climate and available fuel.
for instance I know computing centers are investigating relocating to the north because it's colder. real expenses show up because the climate is changing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @10:57AM
It's just more fake government statistics at this point. Just like all the economic "data" they fudge for political reasons all the time, multiple times each.