While I am not an expert on global warming, the available literature seems to indicate that when everything is considered, the damage of global warming is probably not as high as the damage of the proposed solutions to global warming. That’s of course not to discount the danger or reality of the phenomenon — global warming is undoubtedly real and very serious — but merely to say that too many proposals will achive very little at too much cost (both in terms of actual GDP and in their effect on the lives and cultures of peoples). The existence of a serious problem does not mean we should jump and “do something”, we need to analyse whether what we do might actually make our overall lives much worse than if we did nothing.
Here’s Jim Manzi making the case against a carbon tax or similar approach to address global warming.
Can of worms… here I come.
Hit me. How do we quantify the damage of global warming?
From Manzi:
[citation needed]
Not being adversarial here, curious minds want to know.
I am on a road trip with net access once every two days, so will be brief.
“Hit me. How do we quantify the damage of global warming?”
It is a complicated answer. To summarise, it has three principal parameters.
1)Measurable economical quantifiers, such as loss of GDP.
2)The “discount rate” (because the effects are going to be in the future, one needs to decide at what rate the value assigned decreases with time).
3)Intrinsic costs (decide what value to put to things not easily put into a economic framework, such as freedom, effect on culture, equality, property rights, etc.).
The first parameter is the one most easily dealt with and economists usually restrict to it. The second and third depend to a great extent on your ideology/moral values and so will vary at least somewhat from person to person (that does not mean they are less important).
When I say damage, I mean a combination of all three, put together by my personal philosophy. However, in economics papers, one mostly restricts to the first one (at least explicitly) because that is the easiest to argue; undoubtedly though, the second and third, particularly the second, appear implicitly. Manzi is saying that with any ‘reasonable’ discount rate, the measurable economic damage caused by most actions (such as taxation, or direct mandates on emitters) will exceed the damage due to global warming that would have happened in the absence of the same action. (a greater action will have a greater effect in reducing the rate of global warming, but it will also cause greater economic devastation; the difference always has the wrong sign.)
“Not being adversarial here, curious minds want to know.”
No time now, but surely if you google for other articles by Manzi, Lomborg, etc. you will find lots. I have been through a few citations but don’t remember them now.
Have fun at the road trip. We can pick this discussion when you have the time for it.
Next time some numbers and calculations please. This is definitely not as cut and dried as Manzi portrays. For the moment the wiki makes sense and Manzi looks like baseless babbling.
From whatever I can tell, the wiki looks at the overall economic impact of global warming and concludes it is a significant negative. That’s a no brainer. Almost everyone acknowledges that. When Manzi tals of “limited impact” he is merely using the term relatively, as in “much less impact than the dommsdayers would have you believe.”
Anyway, take a look at this old Lomborg talk.
Edit: Will try to give some links with numbers later.
The problem with Lomborg is that while at least some of his points make some sense, he has long been a rather irrational denier of climate change and worse, has often cherry picked data (like he occasionally did in the meeting that I recently attended). That’s why it’s hard to take him seriously. He needs an image makeup to make himself more convincing.
I would also like to point you to a review of two books on the economics of climate change that include discounting by Freeman Dyson. You might be interested in the policies proposed by Yale economist William Nordhaus that Dyson talks about.
Thanks so much for the Dyson link. It was very useful and a wonderful read. I would actually be quite interested in buying the Nordhaus book and going through it in detail.
Added later: About Lomborg, I have read him (and seen his presentations) over the last few years and he has never been a global warming denier; but like Manzi (and perhaps Dyson?) an opponent of many of the conventional ways of dealing with this issue. Of course I don’t know what his stance was many years ago, but surely that should not stop people from hearing him out now? Also I don’t really think he cherry picks data to hide part of the picture; it is just a rhetorical style where he stresses certain points more (which he thinks are more important).