Is so obvious where this is all going: The wealthy -the factories owners and their close allies- the very same ones ignoring the pledges to stop contributing to climate change will be the only ones protected enough from most damages of climate change, only the wealthy will afford to live in the cities with livable temperature, to buy potable water, only the most resilient of the poor and middle-class will survive, and their youngsters will be used as soldiers to fight for natural resources, some of their families will enjoy those resources but only enough to breed more soldiers to keep the wars going.
Frankly this kind of doomsaying view has no basis in reality. While it's true that unmitigated global warming will impose a very large economic cost, it's simply not the case that it's going to turn the world into some unlivable hell-scape. There's just no basis for that belief in the actual evidence.
The best estimates say that global warming will lower per capita GDP by somewhere between 5-20% by 2100. That's a tragedy, because in aggregate it represents a huge amount of unnecessarily lost wealth. But a 5-20% in GDP per capita does not mean that we'll be dying in the streets.
Let's be very conservative and assume global GDP per capita grows at 2% per year. In the baseline scenario, the median world citizen would still be 390% richer than the average person today. Applying the worst global warming impact (20% of GDP), the median person would still be 290% richer than the average person today.
Unmitigated global warming will make the people of the future substantially poorer. But not nearly by enough to cancel out the effect of continuous economic growth and technological development. It's almost certainly the case that the people of 2100 will enjoy higher living standards than the present.
> it's simply not the case that it's going to turn the world into some unlivable hell-scape. There's just no basis for that belief in the actual evidence.
I think what GP presented is too mild. What I personally fear is this: increasing migration pressure from the most affected areas and contention for resources starts triggering wars, at which point the global economy collapses, at which point at least half of the world's population dies of starvation. Remember, cities everywhere are running on just-in-time supply chains; they have food and water for a couple of days. It's mostly harmless when one city in a country suffers a catastrophe, because emergency response can be put into place. But if the whole country goes into disarray, or the imports of food suddenly stop, things are going to get very ugly very fast.
There is no economic or historical basis for this. When resources become more scare people begin looking into alternatives or alternate extraction methods.
This is how the iron age came to be. Iron was common to many local areas, but the tin to make bronze had to be imported from far away. It took innovation to develop the necessary techniques for iron smelting which turned out to be a superior material for tools in addition to being extremely common and readily available.
They use to think this way about crude oil. That we would eventually run out or that everybody needs to go to war to protect their strategic assets in the middle east. This turned out to be complete non-sense. Techniques that revolutionized natural gas extraction were adapted to oil extraction following massive oil price fluctuations. Now Texas out produces Saudi Arabia. Europe now produces large amounts of petroleum from Norway.
They used to also think this way about lumber and rubber, both of which are renewable resources. Now the world produces plenty of both with minimal environmental disruption.
The US has plenty of coal and coal is relatively cheap to extract and ship, but there will always be a minimal fixed price to coal-based energy. Renewable energy scales more efficiently and now is cheaper than coal due to wholesale energy production, especially in Texas which now also dominates renewable energy production.
When there is sufficient demand people will find a way well before going to war. War is very expensive.
I'm not talking about running out of oil. I'm talking about running out of food, where mass migrations are knocking on the doors of more lucky nations, while new arable and resource-rich land becomes available, as the now frozen parts of the world thaw. Nations know it, these areas are already becoming strategic.
> That we would eventually run out or that everybody needs to go to war to protect their strategic assets in the middle east. This turned out to be complete non-sense.
The way I see it, few wars for control over oil markets have already happened in the last few decades.
> When there is sufficient demand people will find a way well before going to war. War is very expensive.
I don't think this was ever true in history. In particular, this was a common sentiment before World War I - that nations are too connected economically, that it's in no one's interest to go to war. Didn't stop two world wars from happening in less than 30 years.
Societies have collapsed before, and it's likely to happen again. Climate change looks like an extremely good trigger for such an event. It's unclear whether we would be able to recover, or how long it would take.
I absolutely agree, but those two collapse examples are extremely complicated. Historians generally conclude the collapse is due to political instability, barbarian invasions, disruptions to international trade, in-fighting, collapse of agriculture (likely due to climate change) and various other factors.
All of these various competing problems can be summarized into three categories: economic, defense, and political. By far the least critical of those three is defense. I am saying this as a military office who has studied history. If you are wealthy you can fund a better military and better defensive protections. If you are poor but you are politically united and guided by strong leadership you will still probably figure it out. If your economy or food supply fall apart you likely won't have the political unity necessary to mount a strong defense. Likewise if the people are disenfranchised or selfishly entitled there will be less political will to prop up the economy.
"There is no economic or historical basis for this. When resources become more scare people begin looking into alternatives or alternate extraction methods."
It seems obvious they're talking about food.
I am not sure you're closely looked at hydraulic fracturing. One doesn't simply talk about petroleum production, they talk about the IRR of energy projects. That is a fair proxy for whether it takes more energy to get a hydrocarbon out of the ground than it contains. Yes, they are making more, but early entrants into fracking (Whiting, EQT, Pioneer, et al) have all done very poorly and destroyed a lot of equity value. I think a really good case can be made that fracking is intrinsically a financial phenomenon. Huge upfront capex with assumptions of years of production. The track record of that longer tail production is doing poorly (edit: even with different spacing and refracking) in most geologies. Plus, poor infra outside of the permian means more capex.
Lumber has issues too, which will very much be made worse by even a 2 deg C shift.
There is a reason that the US and most countries have huge farming subsidies. A country that cannot feed itself is collapses in very short order. You see this all over the middle east and northern Africa where almost every riot in the "Arab Spring" was about agricultural and food concerns. As you can see in adjacent countries, people migrate from conflict zones and put further stress on neighbors.
When your life and your childrens' live are on the line, you will respect no human or moral laws to get food. That is what terrifies everyone that sees the climate crisis accelerating and is familiar with the next steps of how it's likely to unfold.
Food is an economic data point, frequently a commodity. I know people want to think of as something more special or somehow different, but it isn't. When cheap industrial food goes away the population suffers and the remainder of people who shake out figure it out from other available options. I observed this in Afghanistan.
The societal collapse at that point was a major motivation for the discovery of the iron age. Once the collapse started the supply of tin was instantly eliminated, and thus eliminated bronze. Had these people had iron tools a bit earlier they could have held out longer against some of the barbarian invasions.
IMHO the major threat does not originates from any natural effect of the climate change but rather, as parent has tried to illustrate, from the wars that are likely to erupt for resource/land/water/migrations control.
I mean, when you see how easily we set the world on fire because of some oil or water today, it is not unreasonable to assume that this is going to become even more violent when resources becomes more scarce.
There are potential tipping points that very much could result in much of the world becoming an unlivable hell-scape, at least for humans. We probably can't turn ourselves into Venus, thankfully, but we could end up raising global temperatures by 11-12 C, which would be enough to render most of the Earth unsuitable for human habitation.
It's a tragedy for reasons MUCH beyond 'unnecessarily lost wealth'. I know you are trying to argue in good faith, but you're flat out wrong in the sense that doomsday despair is EXACTLY what we should all be feeling.
A world depleted of its glaciers, lacking in drinkable water, lacking in animal diversity, lacking in arable land, lacking in coral reefs, coastal cities with all their rich history and culture buried underwater and on, and on, is EXACTLY a hellish nightmare.
Who'd want to live on such a planet? Who'd give a fuck about 290% richer?
> A world depleted of its glaciers, lacking in drinkable water, lacking in animal diversity, lacking in arable land, lacking in coral reefs, coastal cities with all their rich history and culture buried underwater and on, and on, is EXACTLY a hellish nightmare.
i hope you're right, but available evidence points the other way:
* glaciers are melting at unprecedented rate, even glaciers previously thought safe like the ones in Antarctica
* as a result, drinking water is running low in many densely-populated places; even groundwater is being exhausted
* we're in the middle of a mass extinction
* coral reefs are under threat, and higher ocean acidity may destroy the ability of new corals to form in the future
not sure about arable land and coastal cities underwater (certainly some will be), but even without those it's looking dire.
We're getting close to the point of no return when it comes to losing all of the ice. That melting process may take 1000 years, but becomes inevitable once there is sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere.
I couldn't find a source for "all the glaciers will melt" but it's a pretty safe bet that if Greenland ice is gone in 1000 years, then so are pretty much all worldwide (mountain) glaciers, and the ice caps.
Yes and not only that but the fact that the glaciers are going to melt over 1000 years is actually worse than if it happened in a single event- instead of a single trauma you have a 1 foot per decade rise, decade after decade, century after century.
> So how much economic damage will pursuing the IPCC's fast transition to a no-carbon energy system spare us? The report asserts that if no policies aimed specifically at reducing carbon dioxide emissions are adopted, then average global temperature is projected to rise by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in global GDP loss of 2.6 percent from what it would otherwise have been. Comparatively speaking, in the 2°C and 1.5°C scenarios, global GDP would only be reduced by 0.5 percent or 0.3 percent respectively.
> Concretely, the global GDP of $80 trillion, growing at 3 percent annually, would rise to $903 trillion by 2100. A 2.6 percent reduction means that it would only be $880 trillion by 2100. A 0.3 percent decrease implies a loss of $2.7 trillion resulting in a global GDP of $900 trillion. Note that the IPCC is recommending that the world spend between now and 2035 more than $45 trillion in order to endow $2.7 trillion more in annual income on people living three generations hence. Assuming the worst case loss of 2.6 percent of GDP in world with a population of 10 billion that would mean that they would have to scrape by on an average income of just $88,000 per year (the average global GDP per capita now is $10,500.)
Plenty of people who would have reason to know think the IPCC's reports are overly conservative because they are trying to spur action / avoid defeatism, and because they have to reflect a baseline consensus of many researchers.
Citing average GDP numbers is ridiculous, No billionaire is going to materially suffer from global warming, plenty of very poor people are. And you can bet the billionaires wont be lining up to help "even things out", so measuring as if they were is broken methodology.
In the US people are getting increasingly angry due to their economic circumstances, despite the fact we live in a growing economy, because the future looks less promising.
What kind of dangerous demagoguery will people turn to if the world economy gets sucker punched? Sure, people will lose, but what happens if a class of people lose far more than everyone else, and refuse to take it passively?
We don't even know what a world without constant growth looks like.
The biggest thing to fear in such a scenario is other people and their weapons.
> Let's be very conservative and assume global GDP per capita grows at 2% per year. In the baseline scenario, the median world citizen would still be 390% richer than the average person today. Applying the worst global warming impact (20% of GDP), the median person would still be 290% richer than the average person today.
This is an absolutely stunning claim to make. It assume growth can just continue in perpetuity forever as if no external factors (food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation, air pollution, global pandemics, extreme weather events, ocean rise etc) could possibly have any impact on that continued growth.
> Frankly this kind of doomsaying view has no basis in reality. While it's true that unmitigated global warming will impose a very large economic cost, it's simply not the case that it's going to turn the world into some unlivable hell-scape. There's just no basis for that belief in the actual evidence.
There's plenty of evidence for an unlivable hellscape, some of it is in your post, you just fail to see it.
> The best estimates say that global warming will lower per capita GDP by somewhere between 5-20% by 2100. That's a tragedy, because in aggregate it represents a huge amount of unnecessarily lost wealth. But a 5-20% in GDP per capita does not mean that we'll be dying in the streets.
A 5-20% drop in global GDP is not going to be a temporary drop, like what we have in a recession. It is going to be a permanent drop in global GDP. Bear in mind that the Great Depression was about a 15% drop in GDP over a few years. Think about how much pain and misery is represented by a drop as big or bigger that is permanent.
Furthermore, it's not going to be 2% year-over-year then suddenly in 2100 it goes backwards. Growth is going to stagnate, and start reversing as the consequences of climate change grow worse.
> Unmitigated global warming will make the people of the future substantially poorer. But not nearly by enough to cancel out the effect of continuous economic growth and technological development. It's almost certainly the case that the people of 2100 will enjoy higher living standards than the present.
I don't think you're grasping the scale and impact of destruction that is possible and indeed, probable if we don't address the problem. Ocean acidification and warming oceans means that coral reefs not only will die, but they will dissolve. Entire ocean ecosystems will collapse because a wide swath of plankton that forms the base of the food chain, will not be able to form their calcium carbonate exoskeletions. Overfishing is already a problem, when fisheries start collapsing, overfishing will finish the job. Today, 2 billion people rely on the sea for their primary source of protein.
Some regions are going to see heat waves that are several degrees above the 2 degrees C average rise. Heatwaves and droughts will drastically reduce crop yields and outright kill crops. Heatwaves can and will kill livestock as well. Disruption of global food supplies and water supplies will create multiple humanitarian crises.
And that's not even getting into the fact that something like 600 million people live in coastal areas around the world. A much hotter climate will not only result in several feet of sea level rise, it will result in much stronger storms and flooding that will destroy trillions of dollars in real estate, not to mention that it will kill people.
Put all of those things together, then think about how hard it's going to be for governments to maintain order. Especially in parts of the world that are already unstable.
