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Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch...

Wikipedia quotes studies that put the estimated aggregate impact at losing about 0% to 20% of world GDP. That's comparable eg to moving from NYC to a place with average US GDP per capita.

That's certainly a lot, but perhaps not a world shattering impact.

(Edit: the studies quoted on that Wikipedia page are quite old by now. It would be useful to find more up to date material.)

For some thoughts on a government job guarantee, see https://web.archive.org/web/20200404052902/https://slatestar...

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Assuming that continued economic growth takes place (a safe assumption; the so-called third world countries are growing at a fast pace), the net economic result could still be positive.

Here's a quote from Nick Bostrom from the Wikipedia article:

> Even the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a report prepared for the British Government which has been criticized by some as overly pessimistic, estimates that under the assumption of business-as-usual with regard to emissions, global warming will reduce welfare by an amount equivalent to a permanent reduction in per capita consumption of between 5 and 20%. In absolute terms, this would be a huge harm. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, world GDP grew by some 3,700%, and per capita world GDP rose by some 860%. It seems safe to say that (absent a radical overhaul of our best current scientific models of the Earth’s climate system) whatever negative economic effects global warming will have, they will be completely swamped by other factors that will influence economic growth rates in this century.

Yes, that's what I was aiming at. Fortunately, these days poor countries develop so quick, that even a 20% hit is equivalent to only a few years of growth.

However, I would go by the formulation in your quote "swamped by other factors" and not with "the net economic result could still be positive."

To make your formulation work, you'd have to say the net impact of business-as-usual growth and climate change. It's easy to misinterpret that.

Do keep in mind that difference places on earth will most likely be hit at a different magnitude. So some will suffer more than others.

That's a good argument for allowing more migration around the world.

> Wikipedia quotes studies that put the estimated aggregate impact at losing about 0% to 20% of world GDP. That's comparable eg to moving from NYC to a place with average US GDP per capita.

That's basically Nordhaus' idiotic argument. Agriculture is only about 3% of GDP, so it looks like we can take that hit, no problem. Except - if we have no food, there is no civilization. See https://braveneweurope.com/steven-keen-4c-of-global-warming-...

Measuring climate change impacts on the economy only by total GDP is a really bad idea. You really can't neglect the dependencies in the economic production, especially on agriculture.

In a sense, it's great that agriculture is only 3% of GDP. A disaster that would make agriculture much harder globally, would mean that agriculture would become a much _larger_ share of GDP, say 50%. And we would be worse off for it.

However, the studies quoted in the Wikipedia article take such considerations into account.

Measuring climate change impact by GDP is a good idea. It's not the only way to measure it, just one out of a number of useful ways.

For example, it is a useful way to figure out how much of our economic wealth we should be spending on fighting climate change:

US GDP seems to be about 60k USD per capita, or about 20 trillion USD total. Spending up to about 10% of that, or 2 trillion USD per year, on reliably fighting climate change might be worth while by that metric.

It also helps us to put into perspective the cost of programmes like the one talked about in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23770718 and make it comparable to energy efficiency campaigns or carbon sequestration, etc.

You are missing all the second order impacts, such as conflict and mass migration.

From the Wikipedia article you linked:

> As stated, economic estimates of climate change impacts are incomplete.[31] Analysts have used integrated assessment models to estimate the economic impacts of climate change. These models do include estimates of some impacts, for instance, the effects of climate change on agriculture.[31] In other areas, models exclude some impacts. An example is the possibility that climate change could lead to migration or conflict.[31]

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