By Paul Homewood
Today’s bilge from the Guardian:
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The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found.
A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost.
A 3C temperature increase will cause “precipitous declines in output, capital and consumption that exceed 50% by 2100” the paper states. This economic loss is so severe that it is “comparable to the economic damage caused by fighting a war domestically and permanently”, it adds.
“There will still be some economic growth happening but by the end of the century people may well be 50% poorer than they would’ve been if it wasn’t for climate change,” said Adrien Bilal, an economist at Harvard who wrote the paper with Diego Känzig, an economist at Northwestern University.
“I think everyone could imagine what they would do with an income that is twice as large as it is now. It would change people’s lives.”
Bilal said that purchasing power, which is how much people are able to buy with their money, would already be 37% higher than it is now without global heating seen over the past 50 years. This lost wealth will spiral if the climate crisis deepens, comparable to the sort of economic drain often seen during wartime.
“Let’s be clear that the comparison to war is only in terms of consumption and GDP – all the suffering and death of war is the important thing and isn’t included in this analysis,” Bilal said. “The comparison may seem shocking, but in terms of pure GDP there is an analogy there. It’s a worrying thought.”
The paper places a much higher estimate on economic losses than previous research, calculating a social cost of carbon, which is the cost in dollars of damage done per each additional ton of carbon emissions, to be $1,056 per ton. This compares to a range set out by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that estimates the cost to be around $190 per ton.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/17/economic-damage-climate-change-report.
Apparently we would now be 37% better off if we had not burned all of those fossil fuels for the last 50 years. One slight problem though – without fossil fuels we would all be living back in the Dark Ages again!
Needless to say, then report’s conclusions are all based on computer modelling, not real world data used to calculate the economic costs of weather disasters etc. And the study itself hives the game away with this graph:
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https://www.nber.org/papers/w32450?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntwg1
And there the whole exercise should have ended.
But there is grant money at stake, so the authors pushed on, determined to concoct a complicated, GIGO model to come up with the results they wanted.
And the inevitable headlines in the Guardian.