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<font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>October </b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>30, 2023</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <br>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ Yikes... I had to listen to this a few
times to fully understand ]</i><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><b>The money men know THE TRUTH about
planetary boundaries!</b><br>
Just Have a Think<br>
</font><font face="Calibri">Oct 29, 2023<br>
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<br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-FJvzgrM00"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-FJvzgrM00</a><br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri">- -</font></p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ a 31 page PDF document ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios</b></font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Limitations and assumptions of commonly used
climate-change scenarios in financial services</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">We have left it too late to tackle climate
change incrementally. It now requires</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">transformational change and a dramatic
acceleration of progress.</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">A growing threat is the approach of ‘tipping
points’ – thresholds</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">which, once crossed, trigger irreversible
changes, such as the</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West
Antarctic ice sheet.</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Some tipping point thresholds have already been
reached,</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">while others are getting closer as global
warming continues.</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Once tipped into a new state, many of these
systems will cause</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">further warming ...</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">- -</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Actuaries have an important contribution to
make here. The</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">application of actuarial principles to
climate-change scenario</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">analysis demonstrates the significant
weaknesses in current</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">approaches. Actuaries also wield enormous
influence in the</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">global financial system. In addition to their
role in the insurance</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">markets, their work in pensions means they can
impact capital</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">allocation in long-term savings in a way few
other professions</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">can, – the financial system is critical to
accelerating a range of</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">positive socio-economic tipping points...</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">- -</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Time is too short to wait for models that are
perfect...</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://actuaries.org.uk/media/qeydewmk/the-emperor-s-new-climate-scenarios.pdf"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://actuaries.org.uk/media/qeydewmk/the-emperor-s-new-climate-scenarios.pdf</a></font><br>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ From Phys.Org -- damn, this is difficult
to take in ]<br>
</i></font><font face="Calibri"><b>Study finds human-driven mass
extinction is eliminating entire branches of the tree of life</b><br>
by Stanford University</font><br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<b>A 'biological annihilation'</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
Next-level loss, next-level consequences<br>
On many levels, genus extinctions hit harder than species
extinctions.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
This example involves the disappearance of just one genus. A mass
extinction of genera could mean a proportional explosion of
disasters for humanity.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>A crucial, and still absent, response</b><br>
To prevent further extinctions and resulting societal crises,
Ceballos and Ehrlich are calling for immediate political, economic,
and social action on unprecedented scales.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://phys.org/news/2023-09-human-driven-mass-extinction-entire-tree.html"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://phys.org/news/2023-09-human-driven-mass-extinction-entire-tree.html</a><br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri">- -</font></p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ here's how to access the research paper --
may be worth reading fully ]<br>
</i></font><font face="Calibri"><b>Earth beyond six of nine
planetary boundaries</b><br>
KATHERINE RICHARDSON , WILL STEFFEN, WOLFGANG LUCHT, JØRGEN
BENDTSEN , SARAH E. CORNEL, JONATHAN F. DONGES, MARKUS DRÜKE, INGO
FETZER, GOVINDASAMY BALA, AND JOHAN ROCKSTRÖM <br>
SCIENCE ADVANCES<br>
13 Sep 2023<br>
Vol 9, Issue 37<br>
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh2458</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>Abstract</b><br>
</font>
<blockquote><font face="Calibri">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.</font><br>
</blockquote>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458</a><br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ Youth activism. ... ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>We are the Last Generation - The Student
Revolution | 19 October 2023 | Just Stop Oil</b><br>
Just Stop Oil<br>
</font>Oct 29, 2023 UNITED KINGDOM<br>
You saw them spraying orange all over the news - the Students are
Fighting back. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HksXPzJEWV4"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HksXPzJEWV4</a><br>
</font><br>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font> </p>
<font face="Calibri"> <i>[ Our succinct predicament - YouTube video
and transcript ]</i></font><br>
<b>Kevin Anderson on CDR and NETs - Reductionist versus systems
thinking</b><br>
Nick Breeze ClimateGenn<br>
Oct 23, 2023 ClimateGenn #podcast produced by Nick Breeze<br>
Prof. Kevin Anderson - excerpt from main interview titled Climate
Failures & Phantasies.<br>
View whole interview transcript: <br>
• Kevin Anderson: Climate Failures and ... <br>
<blockquote>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<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbOBDasUzi4"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbOBDasUzi4</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Intercept voices - clips that challenge ]</i><br>
<b>When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics</b><br>
How an elite clique of math-addled economists hijacked climate
policy.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”..<br>
<br>
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.”..<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.” <br>
<br>
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:<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
What these scientists are describing is global civilizational
collapse, possibly in the lifetime of a young or even middle-aged
reader of this article. <br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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...<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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...<br>
<br>
<b>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.</b> 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.”<br>
<br>
- - <br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
“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’?”<br>
<br>
“When it comes to climate,” Keen said, “the guy is an idiot: an
idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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...<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
<i>[ From the Journal of Economic Methodology ]</i><br>
<b>The economics of immense risk, urgent action and radical change:
towards new approaches to the economics of climate change</b><br>
Nicholas Stern,Joseph Stiglitz Charlotte Taylor &Charlotte
Taylor<br>
Pages 181-216 | Received 11 Dec 2020, Accepted 07 Feb 2022,
Published online: 24 Feb 2022<br>
Cite this article <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://doi.org/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740</a><br>
ABSTRACT<br>
<blockquote>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.<br>
</blockquote>
pdf
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740?needAccess=true"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740?needAccess=true</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[The news archive - looking back to identify
ogres ]</i><br>
<font size="+2"><i><b>October 30, 2003</b></i></font> <br>
October 30, 2003: <br>
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. <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/us/senate-defeats-climate-bill-but-proponents-see-silver-lining.html"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/us/senate-defeats-climate-bill-but-proponents-see-silver-lining.html</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://youtu.be/eJFZ88EH6i4" moz-do-not-send="true">http://youtu.be/eJFZ88EH6i4</a><br>
<br>
<br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri"> <br>
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