[✔️] October 30, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Nine boundaries, Scenarios, Extinctions, 6 of 9, Youth activism, Kevin Anderson, Idiot Economists, 2003 McCain-Lieberman fails
R.Pauli
Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Mon Oct 30 07:13:07 EDT 2023
/*October *//*30, 2023*/
/[ Yikes... I had to listen to this a few times to fully understand ]/
*The money men know THE TRUTH about planetary boundaries!*
Just Have a Think
Oct 29, 2023
Scientists have identified nine so-called 'Earth System boundaries'
beyond which life on our planet will become extremely difficult for many
species, not least us humans. That analysis has often been met with
scepticism, but risk managers at the world's largest financial
institutions have been watching the rapid 'real-world' changes in
earth's atmosphere and the catastrophic impacts on their a
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-FJvzgrM00
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/[ a 31 page PDF document ]/
*The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios*
Limitations and assumptions of commonly used climate-change scenarios in
financial services
We have left it too late to tackle climate change incrementally. It now
requires
transformational change and a dramatic acceleration of progress.
A growing threat is the approach of ‘tipping points’ – thresholds
which, once crossed, trigger irreversible changes, such as the
loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet.
Some tipping point thresholds have already been reached,
while others are getting closer as global warming continues.
Once tipped into a new state, many of these systems will cause
further warming ...
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Actuaries have an important contribution to make here. The
application of actuarial principles to climate-change scenario
analysis demonstrates the significant weaknesses in current
approaches. Actuaries also wield enormous influence in the
global financial system. In addition to their role in the insurance
markets, their work in pensions means they can impact capital
allocation in long-term savings in a way few other professions
can, – the financial system is critical to accelerating a range of
positive socio-economic tipping points...
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Time is too short to wait for models that are perfect...
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/qeydewmk/the-emperor-s-new-climate-scenarios.pdf
/[ From Phys.Org -- damn, this is difficult to take in ]
/*Study finds human-driven mass extinction is eliminating entire
branches of the tree of life*
by Stanford University
The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze river
dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many
scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are
wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they
would otherwise disappear.
Yet, an analysis from Stanford University and the National Autonomous
University of Mexico, published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, shows the crisis may run even deeper. Each of the
three species above was also the last member of its genus, the higher
category into which taxonomists sort species. And they aren't alone.
Up to now, public and scientific interest has focused on extinctions of
species. But in their new study, Gerardo Ceballos, senior researcher at
the Institute of Ecology at the National Autonomous University of
Mexico, and Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies,
Emeritus, in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, have found
that entire genera (the plural of "genus") are vanishing as well, in
what they call a "mutilation of the tree of life."
"In the long term, we're putting a big dent in the evolution of life on
the planet," Ceballos said. "But also, in this century, what we're doing
to the tree of life will cause a lot of suffering for humanity."
"What we're losing are our only known living companions in the entire
universe," said Ehrlich, who is also a senior fellow, emeritus, by
courtesy, at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
*A 'biological annihilation'*
Information on species' conservation statuses from the International
Union for the Conservation of Nature, Birdlife International, and other
databases has improved in recent years, which allowed Ceballos and
Ehrlich to assess extinction at the genus level. Drawing from those
sources, the duo examined 5,400 genera of land-dwelling vertebrate
animals, encompassing 34,600 species.
A total of 73 genera of land-dwelling vertebrates, Ceballos and Ehrlich
found, have gone extinct since 1500 AD. Birds suffered the heaviest
losses with 44 genus extinctions, followed in order by mammals,
amphibians, and reptiles.
Based on the historic genus extinction rate among mammals—estimated for
the authors by Anthony Barnosky, professor emeritus of integrative
biology at UC Berkeley—the current rate of vertebrate genus extinction
exceeds that of the last million years by 35 times.
This means that, without human influence, Earth would likely have lost
only two genera during that time. In five centuries, human actions have
triggered a surge of genus extinctions that would otherwise have taken
18,000 years to accumulate—what the paper calls a "biological annihilation."
"As scientists, we have to be careful not to be alarmist," Ceballos
acknowledged—but the gravity of the findings in this case, he explained,
called for more powerful language than usual. "We would be unethical not
to explain the magnitude of the problem, since we and other scientists
are alarmed."
Next-level loss, next-level consequences
On many levels, genus extinctions hit harder than species extinctions.
When a species dies out, Ceballos explained, other species in its genus
can often fill at least part of its role in the ecosystem. And because
those species carry much of their extinct cousin's genetic material,
they also retain much of its evolutionary potential.
Pictured in terms of the tree of life, if a single "twig" (a species)
falls off, nearby twigs can branch out relatively quickly, filling the
gap much as the original twig would have. In this case, the diversity of
species on the planet remains more or less stable.
But when entire "branches" (genera) fall off, it leaves a huge hole in
the canopy—a loss of biodiversity that can take tens of millions of
years to "regrow" through the evolutionary process of speciation.
Humanity cannot wait that long for its life-support systems to recover,
Ceballos said, given how much the stability of our civilization hinges
on the services Earth's biodiversity provides.
Take the increasing prevalence of Lyme disease: white-footed mice, the
primary carriers of the disease, used to compete with passenger pigeons
for foods, like acorns. With the pigeons gone and predators like wolves
and cougars on the decline, mouse populations have boomed—and with them,
human cases of Lyme disease.
This example involves the disappearance of just one genus. A mass
extinction of genera could mean a proportional explosion of disasters
for humanity.
It also means a loss of knowledge. Ceballos and Ehrlich point to the
gastric brooding frog, also the final member of an extinct genus.
Females would swallow their own fertilized eggs and raise tadpoles in
their stomachs, while "turning off" their stomach acid. These frogs
might have provided a model for studying human diseases like acid
reflux, which can raise the risk of esophageal cancer—but now they're gone.
Loss of genera could also exacerbate the worsening climate crisis.
"Climate disruption is accelerating extinction, and extinction is
interacting with the climate, because the nature of the plants, animals,
and microbes on the planet is one of the big determinants of what kind
of climate we have," Ehrlich pointed out.
*A crucial, and still absent, response*
To prevent further extinctions and resulting societal crises, Ceballos
and Ehrlich are calling for immediate political, economic, and social
action on unprecedented scales.
Increased conservation efforts should prioritize the tropics, they
noted, since tropical regions have the highest concentration of both
genus extinctions and genera with only one remaining species. The pair
also called for increased public awareness of the extinction crisis,
especially given how deeply it intersects with the more-publicized
climate crisis.
"The size and growth of the human population, the increasing scale of
its consumption, and the fact that the consumption is very inequitable
are all major parts of the problem," the authors said.
"The idea that you can continue those things 'and' save biodiversity is
insane," Ehrlich added. "It's like sitting on a limb and sawing it off
at the same time."
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-human-driven-mass-extinction-entire-tree.html
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/[ here's how to access the research paper -- may be worth reading fully ]
/*Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries*
KATHERINE RICHARDSON , WILL STEFFEN, WOLFGANG LUCHT, JØRGEN BENDTSEN ,
SARAH E. CORNEL, JONATHAN F. DONGES, MARKUS DRÜKE, INGO FETZER,
GOVINDASAMY BALA, AND JOHAN ROCKSTRÖM
SCIENCE ADVANCES
13 Sep 2023
Vol 9, Issue 37
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
*Abstract*
This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the
nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well
outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean
acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading
regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have
slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all
boundaries earlier identified as overstepped. As primary production
drives Earth system biosphere functions, human appropriation of net
primary production is proposed as a control variable for functional
biosphere integrity. This boundary is also transgressed. Earth
system modeling of different levels of the transgression of the
climate and land system change boundaries illustrates that these
anthropogenic impacts on Earth system must be considered in a
systemic context.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
/[ Youth activism. ... ]/
*We are the Last Generation - The Student Revolution | 19 October 2023 |
Just Stop Oil*
Just Stop Oil
Oct 29, 2023 UNITED KINGDOM
You saw them spraying orange all over the news - the Students are
Fighting back.
The past few weeks, universities across the country have been covered in
paint. Four students have been arrested on campus so far and risk being
expelled. We are done watching the government's death project of new oil
and gas and our universities sitting by. In November THOUSANDS of
students from across the country are coming together to take action in
London.
This panel discussed the importance of student civil resistance because
we are done watching the government's death project of new oil and gas.
and our universities are just sitting by. With George Monbiot, La Roux,
Carlos Kamya (Students against EACOP Uganda), Emma de Saram (host), and
Holly and Harley - JSO supporters who have taken action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HksXPzJEWV4
/[ Our succinct predicament - YouTube video and transcript ]/
*Kevin Anderson on CDR and NETs - Reductionist versus systems thinking*
Nick Breeze ClimateGenn
Oct 23, 2023 ClimateGenn #podcast produced by Nick Breeze
Prof. Kevin Anderson - excerpt from main interview titled Climate
Failures & Phantasies.
View whole interview transcript:
• Kevin Anderson: Climate Failures and ...
In all of the scenarios, all of the high level scenarios, in the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, what is called Working
Group 3 of the IPCC, all of their scenarios, and indeed, really all
of them, all of the major global high-level scenarios, and these are
scenarios about the future, in terms of energy and emissions, they
all rely on some form of carbon dioxide removal. And these terms
now, trip off our tongue, as if they're perfectly reasonable things
to discuss. Carbon Dioxide Removal, negative emission technologies,
and increasingly even the language of geoengineering. But these
things aren't material, particularly the negative emissions and the
geoengineering, they're not actually material things you can go out
and get and buy at scale. They are at very best, very small pilot
schemes that capture a few thousand tonnes here and there, but set
against the fact is, we're emitting around about 36 to 37 billion
tonnes of carbon dioxide every year from burning fossil fuels. These
technologies are just capturing just a few 1000 tonnes, there's
absolutely no way that you can scale these things up from just being
very small pilot schemes, often with a very chequered technical
history, that you can scale these things up in a timeline that
matches the carbon budgets that come out of the science that relate
to 1.5 and two degrees centigrade. And yet we evoke them as if
somehow they are, they can be aligned, they cannot be aligned. In
fact, they've undermined the narrative, I would argue for the last
at least 10 to 15 years, if not 20 years. So the adoption of these
sorts of technologies, and it's not they're not the only ones, not
only these technologies that are planned to remove on our carbon
dioxide, to suck the carbon dioxide, hundreds of billions of tonnes,
up to half a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
and bury it securely underground in a timely manner. The assumption
of that is actually done the oil companies job for them. It has
allowed us to postulate ongoing fossil fuel use, to avoid major
profound political and social change. I have made this point before;
I think, what I've often referred to as integrated assessment
models, whilst I think a lot of the modellers are good people doing
as objective work as they can, the the boundaries they work within
are deeply subjective. And they have actually done the job of Exxon
for the last 20 years by undermining the narratives we've needed to
have to start to address climate change. So and I think that these
have been so normalised now that when you talk about them, and that
they may not work, as is assumed you almost seem to be an extremist,
so you are an extremist, because you're pointing out that these
technologies that barely exist, are completely relied on in the
models; that is seen to be the extreme position, rather than the
extreme position being, how on earth can it be that virtually every
single model run that we have, rely on these, either technologies or
some other use of, the awful term of nature based solutions. The
language we use, it sort of captures something and makes it all
sound so neat that we can simply put it into the accountancy
spreadsheet that underpins these models, and hey, presto, we can
evoke wonderful low carbon futures that occur almost overnight. And
the journalists have allowed this to happen. A lot of the senior
academics have allowed this to happen. And I think it comes back to
the my point earlier that actually, often as experts, we're very
good at reductionist thinking but we're not very good at Systems
Thinking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbOBDasUzi4
/[ Intercept voices - clips that challenge ]/
*When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics*
How an elite clique of math-addled economists hijacked climate policy.
WILLIAM NORDHAUS, WHO turned 82 this year, was the first economist in
our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His
climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most
consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services
industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics.
Nordhaus’s work literally could affect the lives of billions of people.
This is because his quantification of the immediate costs of climate
action — as balanced against the long-term economic harms of not acting
— is the basis of key proposals to mitigate carbon emissions. It’s not
an exaggeration to suggest that the fate of nations and a sizable
portion of humanity depends on whether his projections are correct.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assumed Nordhaus is to
be trusted. The integrated assessment models used at the IPCC are based
on Nordhausian visions of adaptation to warming that only marginally
reduces global gross domestic product. If future GDP is barely affected
by rising temperatures, there’s less incentive for world governments to
act now to reduce emissions.
Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between
2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, the global economy reaches “optimal”
adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can
continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic
growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to
such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social
change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the
while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.
His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of
Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work. Joseph Stiglitz, former
World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia
University, told me recently that Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly
wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that
optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5 C warming, which
physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate
genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.
In a journal article published last year, Stiglitz and co-authors
Nicholas Stern and Charlotte Taylor, of the Grantham Research Institute
on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics
and Political Science, declared that Nordhausian integrated assessment
models are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk.”
They fail to incorporate “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on
immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our
natural environment.”..
Climate change is one of the instances, Stiglitz and Stern told me in an
email, in which “it is generally agreed there is extreme risk — we know
there are some really extreme events that could occur — and we know we
cannot pretend (i.e., act as if) we know the probabilities. Nordhaus’s
work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep
uncertainty.”..
In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light
by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the
climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is
widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking
about...
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AMONG MOST SCIENTISTS, it’s lunacy to discuss optimization of anything
anywhere when the globe hits even 2 C warming. Climate researchers
Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in a widely cited 2017 paper,
defined 1.5 C warming as “dangerous” and 3 C or greater as
“catastrophic,” while above 5 C was “beyond catastrophic,” with
consequences that include “existential threats.” The late Will Steffen,
a pioneering Earth systems thinker, warned alongside many of his
colleagues that 2 C was a critical marker. At 2 C warming, we could
“activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could
take the Earth system to even higher temperatures.” Such “tipping
cascades” could lead quickly to “conditions that would be inhospitable
to current human societies,” a scenario known as hothouse Earth.
But the path to hothouse Earth will be long and tortured. When I
interviewed him in 2021, Steffen, who died last January at age 75, was
concerned about “near-term collapse” of the global food system. Drought
and heat have already reduced global cereal production by as much as 10
percent in recent years, according to Steffen. “Food shocks are likely
to get much worse,” he wrote in a 2019 piece co-authored with Aled
Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin
University. “The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and
rises much faster beyond 1.5 C of global heating. … Such shocks pose
grave threats — rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial
losses, starvation, and death.”
In a 2022 report titled “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate
Change Scenarios,” 11 leading Earth systems and climate scientists,
Steffen among them, concluded there is “ample evidence that climate
change could become catastrophic … at even modest levels of warming.”
According to the report:
Climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple,
indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and
food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. …
It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems
failures that unravel societies across the globe.
What these scientists are describing is global civilizational collapse,
possibly in the lifetime of a young or even middle-aged reader of this
article.
According to the “Climate Endgame” report, the current trajectory of
carbon emissions puts the world on track for a temperature rise between
2.1 C and 3.9 C by 2100. This is a horrific prospect. Earth systems
analysts tell us that habitable and cultivable land in a 3 C to 4 C
warming regime would be so reduced and ecosystem services so battered
that the deaths of billions of people could occur in the next eight
decades or less...
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Terrible numbers get thrown around. But scientists mean what they say.
Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University
of Manchester in the U.K. and Uppsala University in Sweden, asserts that
“something like 10 percent of the planet’s population — around half a
billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4 C.” He
notes, with a modicum of hopefulness, that we “will not make all human
beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put
themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s
extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 C.”
Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points
and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world,
“it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even
half of that.” Global population today stands at 7.6 billion, with 80
million people added every year...
By contrast, when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did
not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5
percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st
century. Writing in the Economic Journal, Stern set Nordhaus straight in
the harshest terms: “We could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of
billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world,” he wrote.
“It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP
offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe
that 6 C of warming could cause.”
In an email to The Intercept, Nordhaus characterized his colleagues’
critiques as “a distorted and inaccurate description of the work and my
views. I have long supported carbon pricing and climate-focused
[research and development], which are key to slowing climate change. The
proposals in my writings have pointed to targets that are FAR more
ambitious than current policies.” He declined to elaborate on any
distortions or inaccuracies...
*TO UNDERSTAND THE gap between climate scientists and climate
economists, one must first understand that most economists — the folks
we call mainstream or neoclassical economists — have little knowledge of
or interest in how things really work on planet Earth.* The problem of
their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at
university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares
students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex
underpinnings of the thing called the “market.”
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This blithe presumption of constant growth in a climate-damaged future
is the first of Nordhaus’s errors, as Stern and Stiglitz point out.
“Nordhaus’s model doesn’t fully take into account the fact that if we
don’t do more to avert climate change, climate change will affect growth
rates,” they told me in an email. “We will have to spend more and more
repairing damage, leaving us less and less to spend on growth-enhancing
investments.” And, they add, some outcomes arising from weak climate
action could profoundly alter what is possible in terms of economic
activity. Extreme heat, submergence, desertification, hurricanes, and so
on: Such weather events and broad climatic shifts could render large
areas of the world low productivity, unproductive, or uninhabitable.
The second of Nordhaus’s errors is the use of reductionist mathematical
formulas. He employs something called a quadratic to calculate the
relationship between rising temperatures and economic outcomes. Among
the properties of a quadratic is that it permits no discontinuities;
there are no points at which the relationship implied by the function
breaks down. But smooth functions chart smooth progressions, and climate
change will be anything but smooth. Such calculations do not account for
extreme weather, vector-borne diseases, displacement and migration,
international and local conflict, mass morbidity and mortality,
biodiversity crash, state fragility, or food, fuel, and water shortages.
There’s no measurement of amplifying feedbacks and tipping points such
as Arctic sea ice loss, shutdown of vital ocean currents, collapse of
the Amazon, and the like.
The third of Nordhaus’s errors is related to similarly simplistic
formulas. Nordhaus calculates GDP of a particular location as
fundamentally related to the temperature of that place. So, if in 2023
it’s a certain temperature in London, and the GDP in London is
such-and-such, it’s reasonable to assume that when latitudes north of
London rise in temperature in the future, GDP will rise to be the same
as London’s today. Make of this what you will — it’s foolishness on a
grand scale, and yet it’s central to the Nordhaus model.
The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991
paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that,
because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled
environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected
by climate. Nordhaus’s list of the indoor activities free of any effects
from climate disruption include manufacturing, mining, transportation,
communication, finance, insurance, real estate, trade, private sector
services, and government services. Nordhaus appears to be conflating
weather with climate. The one can make trouble for outdoor dining plans
on your yacht. The other sinks the yacht.
Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like.
Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is
sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent
of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce
a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his
calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97
percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to
reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet
Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.
This crude mess of a model is what won him the Nobel. “It shows how
little quality control goes into selecting a winner in economics that he
was even nominated for the prize,” Steve Keen, a research fellow at
University College London and self-described renegade economist, told
me. Keen has authored numerous books that question the orthodoxy of
mainstream economics. He was an early critic of the integrated
assessment models at the IPCC that owe their optimistic sheen to
Nordhaus’s methodology. His caustic 2021 essay, “The Appallingly Bad
Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change,” delved into the problems of
Nordhausian models.
“Any investigative journalist who overcame a fear of equations and
simply read Nordhaus’s texts would have known that his work was
nonsense,” Keen told me. “Assuming that 87 percent of the economy would
be ‘negligibly affected by climate change’ because it takes place in
‘carefully controlled environments’?”
“When it comes to climate,” Keen said, “the guy is an idiot: an idiot
savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”
And it’s not just Nordhaus. Climate economists have followed dutifully
in his footsteps and come up with cost models that appear to have no
relationship with known laws of physics, the dynamics of climate, or the
complexities of Earth systems.
A 2016 study by economists David Anthoff of University of California,
Berkeley; Francisco Estrada of the Institute for Environmental Studies
in Amsterdam; and Richard Tol of the University of Sussex offers one of
the more egregious examples of Nordhausian nonsense. (Tol is one of
Nordhaus’s protégés, and Nordhaus is listed as a reviewer of the paper.)
The three academics boldly assert that shutdown of the Atlantic
meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC — a pivotally important
Earth system that loops warm equatorial water toward the Arctic and cold
water back south — could have beneficial effects on the European economy...
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This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of
climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature
differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC
shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic
Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds
of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly
120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on
coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were
estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters above sea level.
Under these extreme conditions, what would happen to shipping lanes,
coastal cities and ports, and trans-Atlantic traffic of all kinds? For
the climate simpletons Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, the question doesn’t
come up. “It will be a helluva lot stormier on the North Atlantic,
especially for Europeans,” Hansen told me in an email. His study team
concluded that shutdown of AMOC “is in the cards this century, possibly
by mid-century, with continued high emissions.”
It gets worse. Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and
Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas
Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions
of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the
consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that
climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial
civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to
anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss
of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice
sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in
permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.
Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight
were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4
percent of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12 percent that Nordhaus
projected.
Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on
world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than
white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown
savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice
is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s
surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean
methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other
fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice
the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or
collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to
the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for
wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon
would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people.
“The claim that these changes would have effectively zero impact upon
the human economy is extraordinary,” wrote Keen. The reality is that if
all eight Earth system tipping points were reached, humanity would be in
terrible trouble...
AN UNCHARITABLE VIEW of the work of climate economists in the Nordhaus
school is that they offer a kind of sociopathy as policy prescription.
Nordhaus estimates that as economic activity heads poleward with
warming, the massive reduction in GDP in the tropics will be offset by
optimal adaptation in the Global North. “Massive reduction in GDP,” of
course, is not explicitly understood by Nordhaus as food system collapse
across the equator, followed by social collapse, mass death, wars, and
biblical exoduses that produce cascading nonlinear effects drawing the
world into a nexus of unknowns.
Nothing to worry about, assures Nordhaus: The violent extinction of
low-GDP nations will hardly affect the outlook for economic growth
because things will improve in the cold Global North. This is an embrace
of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide...
- -
When I asked him what needed to be done to alter policy at the IPCC,
Keen replied, “We need everyone to be as angry as I am.” Negligence by
economists like Nordhaus, he said, “will end up killing billions of people.”
Andrew Glikson, who teaches at Australian National University in
Canberra and advises the IPCC, has written about the coming era of mass
human death, what he calls the Plutocene, the natural successor to the
Anthropocene. Global governments, he charges, are “criminals” for
ushering in the Plutocene in pursuit of short-term political and
economic gain. I first reached out to him during the black summer of
bushfires that raged across Australia in 2020. Glikson’s mood was foul
then, and it has not gotten better since.
“The governing classes have given up on the survival of numerous species
and future generations,” he told me, “and their inaction constitutes the
ultimate crime against life on Earth.” Part of the reason for inaction
is the false cheer that Nordhaus has spread with his math-genius,
climate-idiot models.
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/
- -
/[ From the Journal of Economic Methodology ]/
*The economics of immense risk, urgent action and radical change:
towards new approaches to the economics of climate change*
Nicholas Stern,Joseph Stiglitz Charlotte Taylor &Charlotte Taylor
Pages 181-216 | Received 11 Dec 2020, Accepted 07 Feb 2022, Published
online: 24 Feb 2022
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740
ABSTRACT
Designing policy for climate change requires analyses which
integrate the interrelationship between the economy and the
environment. We argue that, despite their dominance in the economics
literature and influence in public discussion and policymaking, the
methodology employed by Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) rests on
flawed foundations, which become particularly relevant in relation
to the realities of the immense risks and challenges of climate
change, and the radical changes in our economies that a sound and
effective response require. We identify a set of critical
methodological problems with the IAMs which limit their usefulness
and discuss the analytic foundations of an alternative approach that
is more capable of providing insights into how best to manage the
transition to net-zero emissions.
pdf
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740?needAccess=true
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740
/[The news archive - looking back to identify ogres ]/
/*October 30, 2003*/
October 30, 2003:
The US Senate rejects the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act of
2003 in a 55-43 vote. The bill failed after an all-out assault on the
legislation aided by ExxonMobil-funded "researcher" Willie Soon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/us/senate-defeats-climate-bill-but-proponents-see-silver-lining.html
http://youtu.be/eJFZ88EH6i4
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