Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 183 posts

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#151

Post by mooneater »

tito wrote: post #141
mooneater wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoters please help me understand your angle here

I upvoted, FWIW. Maybe help explain your perspective some more? It sounds like you're just kind of saying "we can't model anything so why bother?". We can model what we can. Sure, the big recession catches the world by surprise, but people are working constantly to model these systems, and it seems to be better than doing nothing. Climate models for example tell us that carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas, and…

Thanks! My order of magnitude range is extreme, but I was thinking of "total cost to humanity" estimate not ppms.

I do think trying to put a price tag on climate change's "total cost to humanity" is truly a hopeless task, and results are bound to be meaningless, due to sheer complexity combine with subjectivity.

How can we meaningfully price biodiversity, the anguish of future generations, permanently escalating geopolitical stress, and the vast flock of black swan events that will result from these changes, in a single dollar amount? I believe such efforts are pure hogwash.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#152

Post by mooneater »

tito wrote: post #141
mooneater wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoters please help me understand your angle here

I upvoted, FWIW. Maybe help explain your perspective some more? It sounds like you're just kind of saying "we can't model anything so why bother?". We can model what we can. Sure, the big recession catches the world by surprise, but people are working constantly to model these systems, and it seems to be better than doing nothing. Climate models for example tell us that carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas, and…

Im not saying climate models are not worth doing, I think we must do them.

But I think the priors on the models are not right, we should be open to publishing radical results not taming them down for palatability.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#153

Post by rayiner »

dahart wrote: post #147
rayiner wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends entirely on (1) whether you think those "aggressive and immediate measures to combat global warming" will work; and (2) the economic cost of those measures relative to climate change costs. One estimate of a 3.7C warming scenario is a total cost of $550 trillion: https://www.axios.com/climate-change-costs-wealth-carbon-tax... . That's about in the 2100 timeframe. That sounds like a lot, except OECD project…

> If you think it’ll cost a lot but end up ineffective [...] then it’s completely rational to vote against it. That is true, and I easily agree with everything you said, but FWIW there have been studies on whether cost-benefit analysis actually works by examining the outcomes after the fact. For example this set of case studies demonstrating that cost-benefit decision making would have historically made the wrong cho…

On the flip sides, focusing on goals rather than costs leads to programs that cost stratospheric amounts without producing the desired results. At the end of the day, we must attempt to rationally analyze our world and make decisions accordingly. If we abandon that, we might as well resort to religion. ("Climate change is God punishing us for the sins of capitalism!" "No! God wouldn't let climate change happen to God's people!").

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#154

Post by mooneater »

tito wrote: post #141
mooneater wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoters please help me understand your angle here

I upvoted, FWIW. Maybe help explain your perspective some more? It sounds like you're just kind of saying "we can't model anything so why bother?". We can model what we can. Sure, the big recession catches the world by surprise, but people are working constantly to model these systems, and it seems to be better than doing nothing. Climate models for example tell us that carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas, and…

Your Impossible Labs looks cool btw, glad you are doing this!

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#155

Post by tito »

mooneater wrote: post #151
tito wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upvoted, FWIW. Maybe help explain your perspective some more? It sounds like you're just kind of saying "we can't model anything so why bother?". We can model what we can. Sure, the big recession catches the world by surprise, but people are working constantly to model these systems, and it seems to be better than doing nothing. Climate models for example tell us that carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas, and…

Thanks! My order of magnitude range is extreme, but I was thinking of "total cost to humanity" estimate not ppms. I do think trying to put a price tag on climate change's "total cost to humanity" is truly a hopeless task, and results are bound to be meaningless, due to sheer complexity combine with subjectivity. How can we meaningfully price biodiversity, the anguish of future generations, permanently escalating geop…

Glad you responded! Lots of thoughts on this.

The estimates are sure to be not exactly right. But I don't let that hold me up!

I see sooooo many people get stuck because they can't figure out "Well is it 700 billion tons of carbon in the air or 900? Will the the warming 4 degrees C or 5?". "I can't do anything if I don't know exactly what it is".

To me it's all just an excuse to do nothing. And I understand it, it's a relief to feel powerless sometimes, "I can't do anything about this, oh well". But we have to fight that. I know there's more carbon in the air than we know what to do with, and we have to take it out. Current capacities are so much smaller than any estimate of the order of magnitude, that my role is building, not predicting.

We do need more modelers and monitors. However, there is a diminishing return to modeling and modeling and modeling. So we need 10X more modeler and 100,000X people building and taking action.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#156

Post by opportune »

sambull wrote: post #27
pstuart wrote: post #2

It's going to happen faster than we've been told. I expect in 10 years global panic will set in.

Mainly because that means there is finite growth in the economy, and we've built a ponzi scheme of sorts at this point. It's a hard pill to swallow, that we can't just grow forever.

We still have a long way to go to become more efficient, which is a way to continue growth without increasing our burden on the planet. Of course the issue there is that efficiency gains can only go so far, and you run into diminishing returns rather quickly.

Also, economic growth does not necessarily rely on increased production of physical goods. If people stopped paying for physical toys in lieu of software, for instance, the economy very well could grow while the physical footprint of the average person decreased (all else remaining the same). If people preferred experiential entertainment such as movies, escape rooms, etc more than e.g. boating, that could also result in economic growth while physical consumption of goods decreases.

But, while we can continue to grow economically without increasing physical consumption (all else being equal), the elephant in the room is that a very large portion of the world does not live a life even remotely similar to that of a wealthy, developed country resident wrt physical resource consumption. So even if we in rich countries maintained our resource usage, global demand for physical resources will continue to grow rapidly as other parts of the world develop. So are we willing to consign huge swathes of the globe to eternal poverty, or will we actively decrease our resource consumption?

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#157

Post by ZeroGravitas »

glitchc wrote: post #104
chris_va wrote: post #23

(disclaimer: I work in a Climate&Energy research group) I just want to remind everyone that there are solutions to climate change. We know how to produce clean energy and sequester CO2. The current free market does not make those solutions profitable for investors, though, and we will have to change that. Solving climate change can be as simple as getting a carbon price adopted. It needs to ramp up over time, allow a…

I’m familiar with the science and I’m afraid to say there are no easy solutions to climate change. Every meaningful systemic solution requires a dramatic curtailment of our current energy use, and would have tremendous negative socioeconomic impact. In short, all meaningful solutions rely on everyone’s life getting a bit worse, and in many cases, esp. in the western world, a lot worse. Furthermore, any systemic solut…

I think this is wrong but I'm interested in your sources for this opinion.

Many of the things we'd need to do are simply better overall but aren't happening fast enough because of political coordination issues.

I believe most of the people complaining about how it will be really tough are actually just spreading (unwittingly or not) propaganda from the narrow interests who benefit from the status quo.

It's no different from all the people talking about how much a less idiotic healthcare system in the US would cost. While multiple other nations already do more with less.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#158

Post by Udik »

iikoolpp wrote: post #83
Udik wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said that billions are gonna die? Frankly, if the solution to climate change will slow economic growth, I think that the highest human cost will come from the lack of growth. To put it in clear terms: lack of growth means that a sewage system, or a hospital, don't get built. This _will_ cause victims.

Almost as if tying essential public utilities to making some rich dude nut at his stock prices isn't a good idea

I find your reply below the minimum acceptable level here; in fact I can hardly guess what you tried to say. Anyway, growth means that people who could not afford things before now can. For you it might be a new car; for somebody else it might mean a sanitation system or a reachable hospital. But who cares, you already have the car and the hospital, so screw growth.

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#159

Post by polotics »

scotty79 wrote: post #32
tito wrote: post #4

Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Find every machine that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find every crop that requires stable land and predictable weather and farm it in a shipping container. Find every underlying infrastructure that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it. Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of fiber optic cables make LEO satellites. Instead…

> Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Zimbabwe style.

Spot on!

Re: Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

#160

Post by ianleeclark »

anm89 wrote: post #111
iikoolpp wrote: post #25

Opened the article expecting it to be a more abstract cost. Turns out it's about economics. Christ alive. "Yeah, billions are gonna die, but what really matters is my house prices are gonna go down."

People love to get outraged when economists talk about human tragedy in monetary terms because they assume the sub text of discussing things in terms of money is that that's what they think is really important about the situation. This entirely misses the point. The economists want something they can measure. They are using dollar losses as a proxy for the gravity of the situation and as a proxy for relative value th…

> The economists want something they can measure. They are using dollar losses as a proxy for the gravity of the situation and as a proxy for relative value that people place on things.

This is a poor proxy, as it over-values areas with high, uneven distributions of capital accumulation. If the Netherlands were to succumb to the impending boiling sea-waters, that would necessarily have a higher "economist cost" than a similar tragedy befalling Nigeria, despite Nigeria having over 10x the population of the Netherlands.

Rather than viewing the very real human impact, the "economist cost" rides the coat-tails of chauvinist mythology by saying that, yes, in fact a Dutchman is worth 11x a Nigerian.

> there's a reason that economists are more likely to get invited to a climate summit than psychologists.

I can guarantee you it's not the reason you think it is.

Post reply on HN