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If you consider the climate, about 100 times that.
by xigency 6y ago
If you consider the climate, about 100 times that.
- vlovich123 6y agoIs there a paper on that? 40 trillion sounds like a lot and I’m curious how that number is generated.
- xigency 6y agoIf you could solve climate change for less than that, I think it would be splendid. To put that number in context, which is just an order of magnitude, it's $5,000 for every person on Earth, about 1.5x the current US national debt, and just under the combined market cap of NYSE+NASDAQ. As an existential problem for humanity that doesn't currently have a solution, I think that's a decent cost estimate.
- Retric 6y agoClimate change his hardly an existential threat for humanity. We survived the last ice age with stone tools, this is a less severe change. Economic impacts from things like rising sea levels really depend on how much we spend on maintaining things as they currently are vs adapting to the new normal. Aka do you live below sea level, raise the city, or move somewhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
- manfredo 6y agoThe last ice age occurred gradually over the span of millennia. Anthropic climate change is occurring in an instant by comparison. Not to mention, humanity survived by mass migration, something that's a lot harder for integrated global economies to do. Few believe humanity is going to go extinct. But extinction of industrialized civilization is a more real concern. And the collapse of industrialized civilization will undoubtedly entail the death of over 90% of the human population.
- Retric 6y agoAn instant in geological time not a literal instant. Death of modern civilization is always a risk, but not directly from climate change. The global food surplus is projected to continue even in the worst case. Energy and raw material production is similarly not a major concern. People continue to live in Dubai which demonstrate how extreme local conditions can get without forcing exodus. Further, few places are expected to get even that bad. Yes, changes to weather patterns, sea levels, invasive species, even diseases are likely. But, collapse of civilization is only really a risk if WWIII kicks off.
- sergeykish 6y agoI like your optimism, people would just live in inhabitable places or relocate and would be welcome, such gentlemen. I expect WWIII.
- Retric 6y agoWhat specifically is going to cause mass migrations in your mind, and on what time scale? Sea level rise on the order of 5 feet in 80 years is hardly going to make most countries uninhabitable. Over longer time scales will see much larger increases, but the yearly change is never projected to be that rapid. Water availability is a concern for farming and industry, but not really people. Desalination is cheap enough for personal use even in India. Every 10 gallons a day is an extra ~4$ per year. Projecting US use age on global poor is unaffordable, but the global poor don’t use nearly that much water.
- sergeykish 6y agoAs armchair academic I kind of understand you. People live in all sort of horrible conditions today - famine, malaria, diseases. As living person I ask myself what if my home was destroyed by flood? What if there is no water to grow food? What if person from the country which caused most of CO2 emissions [1] expects me to be contempt? Shouldn't I blow them up? Maybe all I need to commit is a good preacher. Last mass migration caused by ISIS. COVID caused reduced oil consumption is enough to make a trouble for oil exporters. Global warming is worse - drought, flood, fires. World is extremely fragile, resources supplied from another part of the world, even today cobalt mining is horrible, what would be then? I've heard of another civilization and broken supply chains [2]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#cumulative-co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#cumulative-co2-emis... [2] 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4
- throwaways885 6y agoPeople fleeing the climate alone could collapse the global food chain. I personally thing we're a little too interconnected in the name of efficiency.
- regularfry 6y agoThere's a very real risk that climate change could knock us back globally to a pre-agricultural level. If that happens, there's almost certainly no coming back: the only way we know how to get to our current level of civilization is by extracting substantially all the easily-extractable energy from the Earth's crust. We only get to do that once. This, today, could well be as good as it ever gets, for the only tree of life that we know for sure exists in the universe.
- Retric 6y agoSurface level coal deposits are available across much of the globe, but let’s ignore that. Agriculture can go a long way with animals, wood, and stone. Extracting energy from wind and rivers is easily attainable from that basis. At which point we would have serious energy to work with. Hydro electric dams provide 6.1% of the total U.S. electricity. That is plenty of energy to kick start industrial manufacturing and get to wide spread solar power. The next civilization may be extracting most of it’s materials from our cities, but that’s an advantage if anything.
- pfdietz 6y agoBurning all accessible fossil fuels would cause an increase in CO2 similar to that at the end-Triassic mass extinction.
- adrianN 6y agoThe human race will almost surely survive. Whether our current civilization survives is much less sure.
- karaterobot 6y agoThis is in no way to disagree with your overall point, but marine cloud brightening looks like it might be a fairly cost-effective solution to climate change. It's unproven, but not an insane gamble either, and it has little risk of second-order consequences if it doesn't work. All that at a cost of single-digit billions per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs
- Forbo 6y agoIt seems to me to make more sense combating the problem at the source. This just seems to add more complexity to the problem. Did anyone else think of Snowpiercer when they saw this?
- dylan604 6y agoNot from seeing Snowpiercer, but from everytime I hear some other crazy science scheme. It's like the pharma industry creating ways of dealing with symptoms rather than the cause of the symptoms. It's the ultimate Old Lady Swallowed a Fly.
- virtue3 6y agoI think we can look to austrailia for many many many examples where we thought something would work out when we fucked with nature on a large scale without really studying it. IE. Canetoads.
- runarberg 6y agoWe have many proven solutions to the climate disaster, including, carbon tax, renewable energy, cleaner and more efficient infrastructure, telecommuting, international agreements, etc. Going after a single unproven solution (yes this includes non-existing types of nuclear energy too) is just magic at this point and it doesn’t work.
- karaterobot 6y agoI wouldn't say those approaches have turned out to be sufficient by themselves, so far. Why not keep improving them, and try additional measures with some hope of success and little risk?
- runarberg 6y agoThis rhetoric of new nuclear is gonna solve the climate crises reminds of how GMO was poised to increase our food safety and end world hunger. It didn’t. And since I’ve learned that new technology doesn’t save us when there is an underlying social issue that is causing it. With GMO the issue is food distribution. In the climate disaster the cause is a little more complex but undeniably a few actors are making an unfair amount of money while polluting the climate for the rest of us. I find more hope in solutions like carbon tax, international agreements, greener infrastructure, and general climate justice, then for an unproven magical technology that will be deployed on top of the existing social problems. Never underestimate the tendency of the rich to shift the cost to others while keeping the profit. New nuclear is not going to change that.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoYou ever notice that the countries where the people are pissed off at the rich for taking too much, pissed of at the government and pissed off about climate change are all countries where basically everyone is fed, clothed and has running water and stable electric power? Advancements in technology (including GMO crops) and productivity in general have massively raised standards of living in the developing world. Raised standards of living are what permit people to give a crap about things like oppressed people in the next village over and climate change. Reducing the cost of commodities, like energy and grain, by any means raises standards of living, especially at the margins, and is what permits more people to care about abstract things.
- runarberg 6y agoI’m not sure anything you say here is true: * I really doubt GMO has raised the standard of living for the average person. * I really doubt people in less then stable economy have any less salt towards the rich, the government, or polluters. * I really doubt there is a correlation between the standard of living caring about your neighbors. So to answer your question. No. I have never noticed that countries where people are pissed at the rich are the people that live in stable economy. To prove you wrong, take a look at Greta Thunberg’s twitter feed. She is constantly retweeting people from poorer countries being pissed at the rich for ruining our climate.
- godelski 6y agoI can't think of a specific paper/s off hand but having been at labs where they do climate modeling and going to every talk I could I've heard estimates of tens of trillions to hundreds. So the ballpark at least passes my sniff test, though I know that this isn't a hard source. It is also difficult to estimate the damages and costs of climate change which is part of why costs vary so widely. (e.g. do you include events like Katrina?)
- vlovich123 6y agoJust because someone modeled isn’t particularly compelling. Peer review, meta studies, and testable predictions are critical.
- ogre_codes 6y agoMillion acre forest fires are expensive to deal with. Likewise, drought, relocating billions of people displaced by sea level increase. Might be an under-estimate.