Comment by mrjangles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrjangles | Hacker News Reader

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> Indeed we are already seeing strong negative effects from warming despite only 1C

I think you are spending too much time listening to the media and not enough listening to what academics are saying.

Anthropologists have learned to identify historical warming periods in our history because they are characterized by an explosion of human civilization and life on earth around the world. A large part of the reason the earth currently holds 7 billion people without the mass starvation predicted by academics in the 1960s is because of the current warming period that started around 1870.

As for current academic thought on there matter, there is a large amount of work that predicts up to 2C of more warming could continue to be beneficial for humans. These facts appear in the IPCC reports as summarized here, for example https://www.netzerowatch.com/richard-tol-moderate-global-war....

Also this recent study predicts up to 3C of warming could be beneficial https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/18/3575/htm#B4-energies-12...

Wow, one of these is super old and does not really say what you write it does, the other one only considers heating costs dropping, with no mention of rebuilding burnt houses, replanting forests, etc etc...

>Wow, one of these is super old

2015 is super old?

>and does not really say what you write it does

to quote the letter:

Since 2009, however, more estimates of the economic impact of climate change have been published. These new results do affect the fitted trend, but not in the way suggested by Mr Ward. The new trend shows positive impacts for warming up to about two degrees global warming, just like the old trend did. The new trend, however, shows markedly less negative impacts for more profound warming than did the old trend. In other words, in the last five years, we have become less pessimistic about the impacts of climate change.

How is this not what I said?

The second study says that the economic benefits of warmer winters in terms of less energy needed for warming homes is economically positive as compared to the costs of cooling homes due to warmer summers etc.

I’m not going to try and fact check the paper, but even accepting it at face value it’s obviously a very narrow view of the overall economic impact of global warming and no one should take this paper and derive the claim that 3C of warming will be good for the economy.

The first link is a response to a criticism of a paper by Richard Tol that has had to be revised twice now and at this point is unclear if, post-correction, it truly supports the thesis, that warming may be good for the economy. Tol is an economist who has stated that warming will be economically positive at higher latitudes and economically negative below these latitudes. His math says if you live north of Montreal you should be better off due to a warmer climate. Those south of Montreal (or Munich/Paris for those of you in Europe) will be negatively affected.

If you live in Alaska, Siberia or Scandinavia you may appreciate this analysis. Myself, not so much. If this is the strength of the support for the case that I shouldn’t be worried about a few degrees of warming, I may be a little less worried than I should be!

In so many of these papers it seems to be almost a given that the global south is fucked so, holding that constant, they do a cost-benefit analysis on various levels of warming for already (mostly) rich countries.

Even if you’re okay with that (I’m not) it seems like burying the lede to the point of lying to say “warming is economically positive” without mentioning that, “oh, but only if you live in Canada” (at least in North America).

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