Even with Climate Change, the World Isn’t Doomed | Hacker News Reader

Even with Climate Change, the World Isn’t Doomed

wsj.com

6 pointsmacinjosh6 comments

Lomborg's argument rests entirely on his uses of William Nordhaus's DICE (dynamic integrated climate-economy) model.

Nordhaus is smart, but there are people who think DICE is enough wrong that it is not useful.

For example, although agriculture is a small component of the economy in developed countries (single digit percentages), it's difficult to run an economy if agricultural harvests are 50% impaired, even intermittently. DICE ignores this, to the best of my knowledge. I also believe DICE underestimates costs and durations involved in recovering from large-scale adverse events. It would be interesting to see how well it models the world's response to Covid-19, for example.

Early papers based on the model overestimate the economic cost of emission reductions. For example the costs of wind, PV, and batteries have decreased much faster and to a greater extent than they assumed.

Others point out that DICE doesn't capture things that we value, despite them not having a direct economic value: mostly-inaccessible wild ecosystems, for one. Losing these non-economic things diminishes our future range of choices.

Lomborg also treats all actions to mitigate climate change as a deadweight cost on the economy, when many of them are worth undertaking for health reasons or other economic reasons. Renovating subway systems, for instance.

Finally, his argument in the WSJ opinion is ... subtle? "Because governments and others will take action to mitigate the effects of climate change, governments need not bother to take action to mitigate the magnitude or effects of climate change. And young people shouldn't pressure governments to do so."

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004016252...

WSJ seems to hide what the background of the text author is. (looking up in Wikipedia):

"Lomborg's views and work have attracted scrutiny in the scientific community;[6][7][8] he was formally accused of scientific misconduct over The Skeptical Environmentalist, and the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty concluded in an evaluation of the book that it misrepresented scientific facts.[9]"

"The Lomborg Deception, a 2010 Yale University Press book by Howard Friel, analyzed the ways in which Lomborg has "selectively used (and sometimes distorted) the available evidence",[7] and alleged that the sources Lomborg provided in the footnotes did not support—and, in some cases directly contradicted, Lomborg's assertions in the text of the book.[51]"

Hide? Your post is nothing but an ad hominem.

It's not. It shows that, at best, the author has a huge bias. It also shows that he was previously actively malicious, doing something that is considered disgraceful among scientist (misinterpreting the facts to "support" his arguments). Given that knowledge, no editor should print an "opinion" of his without the text of the disclaimer bigger than the opinion itself. Anything else is active misinformation.

> a 6.3-degree Fahrenheit rise in world temperatures by 2100—which is probable if policy makers do little to stop climate change—would cost only 2.8% of global GDP a year.

As my primary concern was for the welfare of the GDP, this is just a weight off my shoulders

https://archive.md/Ot6dE

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