It’s always some sort of future doom with this crowd
Climate Change Could Cut the Economy in Half. We’re Not Ready for It.
Later this century, sometime toward my teenage son’s late middle age, climate change might torch 50 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. I’ll say that again. Sometime around 2070–2090, climate change could be doing so much damage to ecological and human systems, and the links between them, that the global economy could contract by half. (For comparison: The U.S. economy shrank by roughly 30 percent in the Great Depression.)
This projection may sound exaggerated to the point of being implausible. Yes, two entire regions of Los Angeles burned to the ground last week. Yes, preliminary estimates of the cost of this one disaster range from $40 to $250 billion. But U.S. GDP is roughly $27 trillion; global GDP $107 trillion. Wouldn’t the U.S. and world economies be orders of magnitude more gigantic by 2070? Surely climate change couldn’t wipe out all that wealth?
No, it doesn’t sound implausible, it sounds like the ravings of a fruitcake doomsday cult
According to the U.K. Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, it could. Actuaries are mathematicians who assess economic risk for banks, insurance companies, and governments. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, or IFoA, is the professional association that regulates actuaries in the United Kingdom; it traces its roots to the nineteenth century. It’s hardly an environmental advocacy group, let alone a radical one. Yet last week it released a study in collaboration with scientists at the University of Exeter showing that economists have severely underestimated the potentially catastrophic economic costs of global heating. Again, worst-case scenario, we lose 50 percent of GDP this century.
Even understanding the credentials behind the study, many people will still find this figure implausible. Why is that? Humanity is entering a climate regime that has no precedent in our species’ history. The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the oceans were so much higher that the eastern coastline of what would become North America ended about one hundred miles west of where it is currently. The Arctic, now largely a frozen wasteland, was a lush pinewood populated by giant camels. And our economy is adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere faster than any other phenomenon in geological history has ever done. It is absurd to imagine that severely damaging the climate would not severely damage the economy, which relies on a stable climate, even in the coming decades.
Just complete wackos. Can’t this cult be like other cults and just leave other people out of it?
Read: Climate Freakout: It Could Maybe Possibly Cut the Economy In Half »
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