8 ms·

Heat Domes Are a Red-Hot Warning on Climate Costs

120 points by montalbano 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago
> Martin Weitzman, one of the few economists who warned that these risks were being ignored, was snubbed for the Nobel Prize. Is failing to win a Nobel Prize now a snub? That seems ridiculous on its face.
- mustafa_pasi 5y ago
  It was a political snub. The Economic Prize is always political. They gave the prize to a soft denialist, a guy whose message has always been to downplay the costs of climate change.
  - wazoox 5y ago
    Exactly. See the damning presentation from Steve Keen for OECD in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtKW3OK2_lk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtKW3OK2_lk From this cycle : https://www.oecd.org/naec/averting-systemic-collapse/ https://www.oecd.org/naec/averting-systemic-collapse/
    - roenxi 5y ago
      "Damning" seems a bit strong because Keen's complaint is a bit flimsy. If there isn't any obvious structural link between temperature and wealth or comfort then there does need to be a clearer explanation of why one would develop. Calling the research "stupid" isn't an argument. I also don't really think quoting Twitter threads qualifies as evidence either - this sort of policy deserves a bit more than 140 characters per thought bubble. If he isn't serious about making an attempt to debunk this stuff, then he probably doesn't have a slam dunk case. No argument that economics prizes are highly political, though.
      - specialist 5y ago
        Your hot take is ungenerous, inaccurate. Considering the stakes, it's also highly irresponsible. Noob layperson's TLDR for the viewing audience: Using his damage function, Nordhaus concludes 4° warming is "optimal" economically, balancing costs of action and inaction. Keen's first point is that 2° is game over, ending civilization as we know it, rendering equatorial regions uninhabitable, the death of many many people. Then Keen systematically, surgically dissects Nordhaus' assumptions, analysis, and conclusions. Lies by omission, misuse of data, inappropriate contexts (eg assuming continuous functions, ignoring tipping points). More egregiously, Nordhaus completely ignores the physical world. Keen finishes by recommending: including energy and climate feedback into econometric models; reforms to IPCC, including replacing old school economists with climate scientists and climate savvy economists.
        specialist 5y ago
        > is that 2° is game over Errata: 4°. I musta fat fingered my edit.
      - klyrs 5y ago
        > If there isn't any obvious structural link between temperature and wealth or comfort then there does need to be a clearer explanation of why one would develop. What do you mean "if?" Thanks to my affluence, I sat out the heat wave in the comfort of central AC. It was a little warm upstairs; my principal discomfort was that the kitchen was so cold that I needed to wear a sweater. I went outside to take the trash out at the peak temperature just because I wanted to feel it. I drove my air conditioned car, already cool from the garage, to the air conditioned grocery store, and had to walk about 30m in the heat. I could have had those groceries delivered, but again, I preferred the "adventure." Only... we couldn't get food delivered because, I presume, not enough delivery drivers have AC. They're not as affluent as myself. Wealth, comfort, and temperature are strongly linked. You know Bezos wouldn't need to go for takeout like me. Worst case, he'd call a dealership to deliver a car to a driver to do his errands.
  - barney54 5y ago
    William Nordhaus is not a “soft denialist.” He’s the economist that has done more to consider the cost and benefits of climate change than anyone else.
    - orwin 5y ago
      4°C being the "optimal" change and his damage function ignoring pretty much how balanced system works is not soft denial then. Soft denial is saying "climate change does exist, but its impact on the population will be lower than mesures destined to curb it". I hope his grandchildren and great-grandchildren will hear this speculation.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      “Climate change is actually good because of reasons that others highly disagree with” is denialism.
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  I'm on team- Stop caring about the Nobel Prize. It's political not merit based. Either don't bring it up, or only mention the fails.
  - eplanit 5y ago
    My respect for Nobel prizes ceased when they awarded the peace prize to Obama for simply having won an election. Nothing against Obama, but it revealed how meaningless and political Nobel prizes are.
    - jeltz 5y ago
      The peace prize has almost always been very bad. The ones you should take seriously are the ones in various sciences.
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      Henry Kissinger getting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 was kind of sufficient already.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  Being nit-picky, there's no such thing as a Nobel Prize for economics.
ximeng 5y ago
Article by a guy called Noah!
mustafa_pasi 5y ago
This is good news for climate action. The less predictable climate change costs are, the more likely it is that the ones holding the reigns of power will act. If it was entirely easy to predict that such and such places were doomed, then these people would just divest from those regions and leave them to their doom.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  Was thinking this yesterday, hopefully this is a wakeup call for moderates.
- bairrd 5y ago
  People are very quick to cry "someone should do something" when these extreme events happen. You offer the same people something, in the grand scheme of things fairly moderate like the Green New Deal, and they calcify back to their party affiliations. We're so doomed.
  - II2II 5y ago
    Don't worry. There will be mass migrations of people as oceans and deserts encroach upon inhabited areas. There will be wars over access to fresh water and agricultural land. Yet once mother nature has gotten humanity's behaviour in check, the hairless ape will persist. (This response is not intended to taken literally. My point is that we will survive, though the process of adaptation may be painful and we may not like what we may not enjoy what we are adapting to.)
    - XorNot 5y ago
      "we" in human terms doesn't mean "you". It also doesn't even mean "Americans" as a collective - whom the pandemic shows are not that concerned about dead Americans citizens when their isn't a country to bomb in response.
  - 5y ago
wazoox 5y ago
Keep in mind the scale of the experiment we're living in: between the peak of last ice age (when most of today's developed countries were either under a thick dome of ice, or dry cold steppes with roaming hordes of woolly mammoths) and pre-industrial climate, the global temperature increase was only 5°C, occurring over a few millenia (though this increase was enough to destroy completely this environment and its mammoths, wooly rhinos, cave bears, etc). Now we're talking of adding 4°C in a couple of centuries. What could go wrong, really? Yeah, about everything, and really strong and fast. People don't worry because they think of having 4°C daily increase temperature, no big deal: temperature swings daily by tens of degrees. But they should instead think of a fever: a 2°C fever is already pretty strong; a 4°C fever is a very serious condition, potentially deadly.
- AlexanderDhoore 5y ago
  Global increase of 4°C means about 8°C increase on land (roughly double). Anything past 3-4°C global increase is just destruction of a massive scale. Just 2°C would be manageable, but we are going to shoot past that really fast (me things). EDIT: My first sentence is scientific fact (double land temperature). My second sentence is mostly accepted by climate scientists, though the details can be debated (just how bad it's going to get). The third sentence is my personal opinion and only time will tell. But sure, downvote me.
- syops 5y ago
  I’m not a climate scientist and a few degree increase used to seem like a small thing to me. Then I realized that increasing the global temperature average by a few degrees means putting in a massive amount of more energy into the system and then it clicked for me how much of a big deal this is. This massive increase in energy into the system over a very short period of time means lots of chaotic events will ensue before a new equilibrium is obtained.
  - madaxe_again 5y ago
    It’s interesting that you touch on energy — temperature is a measure of the energy of a system, but most people don’t think of it in those terms. If you consider how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of your living room by 4C (about 840J per m3), and then extrapolate that to the entire planet, it’s a phenomenal amount of energy, incomprehensibly vast. Then, consider that the oceans, with a heat capacity of 4.2MJ per m3 and a vast volume are also warming by entire degrees, and it’s just staggering.
fallingknife 5y ago
Wait I thought outlier weather events like blizzards and heat waves weren't indicators of global climate as the media so likes to lecture about when it's not in favor of their narrative.
- AlexanderDhoore 5y ago
  The trend is what matters, not the individual events. These "outlier" events are now happening regularly, so the trend has changed. Because climate change.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    But this isn't happening regularly. For example the temperature record that was set in Canada in this heatwave had stood since 1937.
    - syops 5y ago
      That’s looking a at max and minima. Look at max monthly or yearly temperatures and you’ll see the trend that was mentioned. By looking at monthly and yearly temperature trends you are less likely to be swayed by one off outlier events.
      - bequanna 5y ago
        Global Warming. Wait, no, Global Cooling! Actually guys, it's "Climate Change". And now the latest hotness (pun intended) is an increase in "extreme" weather events. Why does the alarmist metric always seem to be changing to something that is more difficult to actually measure?
        SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
        I feel like climate change and increase in extreme weather events are the same thing though. I’ve been familiar with this term for decades. It’s not new.
hbogert 5y ago
I wish we could un-invent the notion of averages. Look at it in this case, 2°C increase. Everybody shrugs their shoulders. Yet it's these outlier events which will stop being outliers.
pl-94 5y ago
We need to mourn a normal life. We won't and we shalln't live the same life with the same goals than the previous generation. Mourning does not mean to become nihilist. But that the only way to get excited by new sustainable and resilient projects.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
Why is everything portrayed in a sensationalist outrageous bad negative way. This is ultimately a neutral thing. Climate change has been happening since the dawn of time. The transition period will suck but human beings will adapt. There may be positive things that come out of it as well.
betwixthewires 5y ago
I think this author is probably unaware, but in the case of the recent pacific northwest heat wave, it was due to something called an omega disruption of the northern jet stream, a phenomenon which IPCC models predict will occur less frequently with climate change. A shame he wrote an entire article based on not knowing this and did no research on it. > Climate change is almost certainly involved No, it's not. Please, stop doing this. stop presuming that every weather phenomenon is in some way causally related to climate change. There are things that are. But know which things are before you write about them and blame climate change. You make "trust the science" look like a joke and it's no wonder so many people are beginning to think it is. Do your job. Do some research. Know what you're talking about before you talk about it.

120 points by montalbano 5y ago

> Martin Weitzman, one of the few economists who warned that these risks were being ignored, was snubbed for the Nobel Prize. Is failing to win a Nobel Prize now a snub? That seems ridiculous on its face.

mustafa_pasi 5y ago
It was a political snub. The Economic Prize is always political. They gave the prize to a soft denialist, a guy whose message has always been to downplay the costs of climate change.
- wazoox 5y ago
  Exactly. See the damning presentation from Steve Keen for OECD in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtKW3OK2_lk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtKW3OK2_lk From this cycle : https://www.oecd.org/naec/averting-systemic-collapse/ https://www.oecd.org/naec/averting-systemic-collapse/
  - roenxi 5y ago
    "Damning" seems a bit strong because Keen's complaint is a bit flimsy. If there isn't any obvious structural link between temperature and wealth or comfort then there does need to be a clearer explanation of why one would develop. Calling the research "stupid" isn't an argument. I also don't really think quoting Twitter threads qualifies as evidence either - this sort of policy deserves a bit more than 140 characters per thought bubble. If he isn't serious about making an attempt to debunk this stuff, then he probably doesn't have a slam dunk case. No argument that economics prizes are highly political, though.
    - specialist 5y ago
      Your hot take is ungenerous, inaccurate. Considering the stakes, it's also highly irresponsible. Noob layperson's TLDR for the viewing audience: Using his damage function, Nordhaus concludes 4° warming is "optimal" economically, balancing costs of action and inaction. Keen's first point is that 2° is game over, ending civilization as we know it, rendering equatorial regions uninhabitable, the death of many many people. Then Keen systematically, surgically dissects Nordhaus' assumptions, analysis, and conclusions. Lies by omission, misuse of data, inappropriate contexts (eg assuming continuous functions, ignoring tipping points). More egregiously, Nordhaus completely ignores the physical world. Keen finishes by recommending: including energy and climate feedback into econometric models; reforms to IPCC, including replacing old school economists with climate scientists and climate savvy economists.
      - specialist 5y ago
        > is that 2° is game over Errata: 4°. I musta fat fingered my edit.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      > If there isn't any obvious structural link between temperature and wealth or comfort then there does need to be a clearer explanation of why one would develop. What do you mean "if?" Thanks to my affluence, I sat out the heat wave in the comfort of central AC. It was a little warm upstairs; my principal discomfort was that the kitchen was so cold that I needed to wear a sweater. I went outside to take the trash out at the peak temperature just because I wanted to feel it. I drove my air conditioned car, already cool from the garage, to the air conditioned grocery store, and had to walk about 30m in the heat. I could have had those groceries delivered, but again, I preferred the "adventure." Only... we couldn't get food delivered because, I presume, not enough delivery drivers have AC. They're not as affluent as myself. Wealth, comfort, and temperature are strongly linked. You know Bezos wouldn't need to go for takeout like me. Worst case, he'd call a dealership to deliver a car to a driver to do his errands.
- barney54 5y ago
  William Nordhaus is not a “soft denialist.” He’s the economist that has done more to consider the cost and benefits of climate change than anyone else.
  - orwin 5y ago
    4°C being the "optimal" change and his damage function ignoring pretty much how balanced system works is not soft denial then. Soft denial is saying "climate change does exist, but its impact on the population will be lower than mesures destined to curb it". I hope his grandchildren and great-grandchildren will hear this speculation.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    “Climate change is actually good because of reasons that others highly disagree with” is denialism.
deregulateMed 5y ago
I'm on team- Stop caring about the Nobel Prize. It's political not merit based. Either don't bring it up, or only mention the fails.
- eplanit 5y ago
  My respect for Nobel prizes ceased when they awarded the peace prize to Obama for simply having won an election. Nothing against Obama, but it revealed how meaningless and political Nobel prizes are.
  - jeltz 5y ago
    The peace prize has almost always been very bad. The ones you should take seriously are the ones in various sciences.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Henry Kissinger getting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 was kind of sufficient already.
kingsuper20 5y ago
Being nit-picky, there's no such thing as a Nobel Prize for economics.

ximeng 5y ago

Article by a guy called Noah!

mustafa_pasi 5y ago

This is good news for climate action. The less predictable climate change costs are, the more likely it is that the ones holding the reigns of power will act. If it was entirely easy to predict that such and such places were doomed, then these people would just divest from those regions and leave them to their doom.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deregulateMed 5y ago
Was thinking this yesterday, hopefully this is a wakeup call for moderates.
bairrd 5y ago
People are very quick to cry "someone should do something" when these extreme events happen. You offer the same people something, in the grand scheme of things fairly moderate like the Green New Deal, and they calcify back to their party affiliations. We're so doomed.
- II2II 5y ago
  Don't worry. There will be mass migrations of people as oceans and deserts encroach upon inhabited areas. There will be wars over access to fresh water and agricultural land. Yet once mother nature has gotten humanity's behaviour in check, the hairless ape will persist. (This response is not intended to taken literally. My point is that we will survive, though the process of adaptation may be painful and we may not like what we may not enjoy what we are adapting to.)
  - XorNot 5y ago
    "we" in human terms doesn't mean "you". It also doesn't even mean "Americans" as a collective - whom the pandemic shows are not that concerned about dead Americans citizens when their isn't a country to bomb in response.
- 5y ago

wazoox 5y ago

Keep in mind the scale of the experiment we're living in: between the peak of last ice age (when most of today's developed countries were either under a thick dome of ice, or dry cold steppes with roaming hordes of woolly mammoths) and pre-industrial climate, the global temperature increase was only 5°C, occurring over a few millenia (though this increase was enough to destroy completely this environment and its mammoths, wooly rhinos, cave bears, etc). Now we're talking of adding 4°C in a couple of centuries. What could go wrong, really? Yeah, about everything, and really strong and fast. People don't worry because they think of having 4°C daily increase temperature, no big deal: temperature swings daily by tens of degrees. But they should instead think of a fever: a 2°C fever is already pretty strong; a 4°C fever is a very serious condition, potentially deadly.

AlexanderDhoore 5y ago
Global increase of 4°C means about 8°C increase on land (roughly double). Anything past 3-4°C global increase is just destruction of a massive scale. Just 2°C would be manageable, but we are going to shoot past that really fast (me things). EDIT: My first sentence is scientific fact (double land temperature). My second sentence is mostly accepted by climate scientists, though the details can be debated (just how bad it's going to get). The third sentence is my personal opinion and only time will tell. But sure, downvote me.
syops 5y ago
I’m not a climate scientist and a few degree increase used to seem like a small thing to me. Then I realized that increasing the global temperature average by a few degrees means putting in a massive amount of more energy into the system and then it clicked for me how much of a big deal this is. This massive increase in energy into the system over a very short period of time means lots of chaotic events will ensue before a new equilibrium is obtained.
- madaxe_again 5y ago
  It’s interesting that you touch on energy — temperature is a measure of the energy of a system, but most people don’t think of it in those terms. If you consider how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of your living room by 4C (about 840J per m3), and then extrapolate that to the entire planet, it’s a phenomenal amount of energy, incomprehensibly vast. Then, consider that the oceans, with a heat capacity of 4.2MJ per m3 and a vast volume are also warming by entire degrees, and it’s just staggering.

fallingknife 5y ago

Wait I thought outlier weather events like blizzards and heat waves weren't indicators of global climate as the media so likes to lecture about when it's not in favor of their narrative.

AlexanderDhoore 5y ago
The trend is what matters, not the individual events. These "outlier" events are now happening regularly, so the trend has changed. Because climate change.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  But this isn't happening regularly. For example the temperature record that was set in Canada in this heatwave had stood since 1937.
  - syops 5y ago
    That’s looking a at max and minima. Look at max monthly or yearly temperatures and you’ll see the trend that was mentioned. By looking at monthly and yearly temperature trends you are less likely to be swayed by one off outlier events.
    - bequanna 5y ago
      Global Warming. Wait, no, Global Cooling! Actually guys, it's "Climate Change". And now the latest hotness (pun intended) is an increase in "extreme" weather events. Why does the alarmist metric always seem to be changing to something that is more difficult to actually measure?
      - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
        I feel like climate change and increase in extreme weather events are the same thing though. I’ve been familiar with this term for decades. It’s not new.

hbogert 5y ago

I wish we could un-invent the notion of averages. Look at it in this case, 2°C increase. Everybody shrugs their shoulders. Yet it's these outlier events which will stop being outliers.

pl-94 5y ago

We need to mourn a normal life. We won't and we shalln't live the same life with the same goals than the previous generation. Mourning does not mean to become nihilist. But that the only way to get excited by new sustainable and resilient projects.

nickthemagicman 5y ago

Why is everything portrayed in a sensationalist outrageous bad negative way. This is ultimately a neutral thing. Climate change has been happening since the dawn of time. The transition period will suck but human beings will adapt. There may be positive things that come out of it as well.

betwixthewires 5y ago

I think this author is probably unaware, but in the case of the recent pacific northwest heat wave, it was due to something called an omega disruption of the northern jet stream, a phenomenon which IPCC models predict will occur less frequently with climate change. A shame he wrote an entire article based on not knowing this and did no research on it. > Climate change is almost certainly involved No, it's not. Please, stop doing this. stop presuming that every weather phenomenon is in some way causally related to climate change. There are things that are. But know which things are before you write about them and blame climate change. You make "trust the science" look like a joke and it's no wonder so many people are beginning to think it is. Do your job. Do some research. Know what you're talking about before you talk about it.