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Comment by cloutchaser | Hacker News Reader

It's important to remember that the IPCC, the UNs group of scientists who study climate change say that the worst case scenario is that growth in GDP will be 4% less by 2050 due to climate change.

Growth. Not actual GDP. Over the next 28 years that means if the world GDP expands 100%, so doubles, unchecked climate change will mean that is only 96%.

That is not the apocalyptic situation that is constantly in the media. The world won't die in a fireball. It's a problem, that needs to be dealt with, but we need to keep context. Covid and the Ukraine war have already had a worse impact on humans worldwide that climate change.

And there are a million other black swan events we could be afraid of that are just as likely as climate change, yet we don't care about them because it's not on the BBC. Supervolcanoes, asteroids, tsunamis, more deadly viruses, etc etc.

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Can you provide a source for that number? I didn't find it in the IPCC reports and googling the impact of climate change on GDP gives _very_ different results: https://www.reuters.com/world/climate-change-putting-4-globa...

Edit: to be clear, that's not the only thing dubious about your comment. The IPCC does not study climate change but aggregates climate change studies. Asteroids are obviously less "likely" than climate change which shouldn't even be a category because climate change is already happening and already has a real impact. "The world won't die in a fireball" is a red herring, the world will be fine but people will be far worse off, especially poor substance farmers in sub-saharan Africa, who also – to come back to you original point – don't contribute a lot to global GDP but are still humans that matter and shouldn't starve to death.

https://financialpost.com/opinion/opinion-ipcc-global-warmin...

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2021-08-11-bjorn-l...

A few extracts (I got the date wrong its 2100 not 2050):

Because of economic development, the UN estimates that the average person in the world will become 450 per cent as well-off by 2100 as they are today. But climate change will have a cost, in that adaptation and challenges become somewhat harder. Because of climate change, the average person in 2100 will “only” be 436 per cent as well off as today.

Also:

This matters, because globally, many more people die from cold than from heat. A new study in the highly respected journal Lancet shows that about half a million people die annually from heat, but 4.5 million people die from cold. As temperatures have increased over the past two decades, that has caused an extra 116,000 heat deaths each year. This fits the narrative, of course, and is what we have heard over and over again.

You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.

But it turns out that because global warming has also reduced cold waves, we now see 283,000 fewer cold deaths. You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.

The author of the opinion pieces you cited is apparently relying on this study regarding cold deaths:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

But his interpretation is dubious at best because the study is not about climate change! The reduction in deaths attributed to cold or heat might not be connected to climate change at all, the study doesn't say anything about it. That's solely the author's interpretation. From the actual study (which is also pure speculation because their method doesn't provide this causality): "The results indicate that global warming might slightly reduce the net temperature-related deaths, although, in the long run, climate change is expected to increase mortality burden."

He also doesn't provide a clear source for his claims on economic development, so I'm still sceptical.

Here it reads much more critical than your statement of just a small reduction to the GDP:

https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/02/28/pr-wgii-ar6/

We talk about a world with more human losses, dry spills interrupting businesses. Spending much more money on rebuilding destroyed infrastructure.

The heat wave in Germany threatened plenty of critical water ways.

Mass live amount of animals just died.

Do you wanna live on an empty planet?

And we don't know yet how bad it can get.

Take a really bad long heat wave in a big city (we have a lot of them) and guess how many could just die in a mass city death event based on cascading issues like to hot for streets, no longer enough water etc.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2021-08-11-bjorn-l...

This article doesn't reference anything and it repairs a claim that CO2 is adding more green to our planet which is true but not relevant.

My link references the IPCC directly.

And I have seen the German drought. I have seen animal death.

It's not a theoretically thing.

And at least from my side it changes fundamentally my surroundings. Germany was not a dry country before.

> Do you wanna live on an empty planet?

Don't worry we won't survive it.

So, if we in 2012 had known 100% that Covid would hit in 2020, the correct course of action would have been to do nothing, since maybe an asteroid would hit us in the meantime?

Also, global GDP is $80,934,771,028,340[1]. So, if that doubles to 160 in 2050, that means that we’d burned $3,200,000,000,000[2] in vain in just 2050. That’s not chump change.

[1] In 2017, https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/

[2] I think it’s correct: 4% * $80,934,771,028,340, and rounded

The point is, don't panic, and also assess with numbers and data whether the best course of action is to do what we are doing. Many (especially in europe) are on a course to remove way more than 4% of GDP in the name of global warming. So they are destroying way more value than they are saving.

Doing nothing would have likely let to a far better outcome than what we have.

You know there are more important things in this world than the economy? I'd argue everything is more important than a man-made system that solely revolves around money and commerce, especially nature and bio-diversity

> It's important to remember that the IPCC, the UNs group of scientists who study climate change say that the worst case scenario is that growth in GDP will be 4% less by 2050 due to climate change.

How many lives could be saved using 4% of global GDP?

How much would it cost to avert climate change? Several studies have shown that the cost to avoid the damage of climate change is much cheaper than dealing with the outcomes. If you think 4% is nothing to be concerned about, why don't we spend 4% of global GDP fixing the problem?

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