Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought–Guardian
By Paul Homewood
Today’s bilge from the Guardian:
The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found.
A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost.
A 3C temperature increase will cause “precipitous declines in output, capital and consumption that exceed 50% by 2100” the paper states. This economic loss is so severe that it is “comparable to the economic damage caused by fighting a war domestically and permanently”, it adds.
“There will still be some economic growth happening but by the end of the century people may well be 50% poorer than they would’ve been if it wasn’t for climate change,” said Adrien Bilal, an economist at Harvard who wrote the paper with Diego Känzig, an economist at Northwestern University.
“I think everyone could imagine what they would do with an income that is twice as large as it is now. It would change people’s lives.”
Bilal said that purchasing power, which is how much people are able to buy with their money, would already be 37% higher than it is now without global heating seen over the past 50 years. This lost wealth will spiral if the climate crisis deepens, comparable to the sort of economic drain often seen during wartime.
“Let’s be clear that the comparison to war is only in terms of consumption and GDP – all the suffering and death of war is the important thing and isn’t included in this analysis,” Bilal said. “The comparison may seem shocking, but in terms of pure GDP there is an analogy there. It’s a worrying thought.”
The paper places a much higher estimate on economic losses than previous research, calculating a social cost of carbon, which is the cost in dollars of damage done per each additional ton of carbon emissions, to be $1,056 per ton. This compares to a range set out by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that estimates the cost to be around $190 per ton.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/17/economic-damage-climate-change-report.
Apparently we would now be 37% better off if we had not burned all of those fossil fuels for the last 50 years. One slight problem though – without fossil fuels we would all be living back in the Dark Ages again!
Needless to say, then report’s conclusions are all based on computer modelling, not real world data used to calculate the economic costs of weather disasters etc. And the study itself hives the game away with this graph:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w32450?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntwg1
And there the whole exercise should have ended.
But there is grant money at stake, so the authors pushed on, determined to concoct a complicated, GIGO model to come up with the results they wanted.
And the inevitable headlines in the Guardian.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
How many trillions have already been wasted in the Western world fighting the mythical climate change? And how many more will be wasted unless Net Zero is immmediately abandoned?
The whole point of the Climate Change fraud was to destroy the economies of Western countries .
So no steel industry , car manufacture ,farming being hit , thousands of businesses going bankrupt due to energy costs , normal families paying out much more money just to survive .
Yes , the economic damage has been tremendous , and will get worse if the NET ZERO madness continues .
But that was what was planned by the UN IPCC Marxists .https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
Yes, We all remember Christina Figuers (UN’,’s FCCC) saying ‘the goal of is to detroy capitalism’. It is amazing that so-called conservatives do not realise this.
We are living in a pantomime.
It’s the only explanation.
And before you say anything, oh yes we are! 🙂
Agree – The Emperor’s New Clothes – that one would work.
Greta is behind you!
I thought all that was behind you
Climate change deniers are the only sane ones in the room. It is the grant funded junkie researcher’s that are perpetuating the scam against humanity.
“Climate change deniers … ”
Who is denying that the climate has been changing for millions of years and will continue to change for millions of years, irrespective of human activities ?
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It’s completely ludicrous!! Everything we know about the development of the world’s civilisations, from the Mayans and the Incas through the Persians, Greeks, Romans, to western progress through the early years of the second millennium CE tells us that during warm times we thrive and move forward and during cold times we stagnate.
And we are currently in danger of taking great strides backwards because we are listening to pseudo-scientists who have abandoned the search for truth in favour of a pseudo-political philosophy which has no grounding in science, history or common sense. Urged on by increasingly naive media for whom scare stories are bread and butter and mendacity a way of life.
Our grandchildren will curse us and with justification.
They will curse us anyway, justified or not.
“Everything … tells us that during warm times we thrive and move forward and during cold times we stagnate.”
Nail on head. This is precisely why we are being driven back to colder, darker, hungrier times.
Hi Paul, how can I forward you some interesting emails from the Met Office I have received in recent days relating to false CIMO site ratings AND non existent/closed sites quoting data.
Ray, if you email me at Osborn.ac@gmail.com I can give you Paul’s email address.
Have emailed yo AC, thanks for your assistance – much appreciated.
I dsee they’re using the fake temperature graph that removes the 40s to 70s cooling.
Also covered by Tony Heller
By 2100, Gamecock expects to be 100% dead.
without fossil fuels we would all be living back in the Dark Ages
WIthout fossil fuels, there might be a few humans living in tropical areas, but that would be all.
Even the absurd Stern Review with its junk discount rates claimed only 20% GDP reduction by 2100 with no mitigation (20% reduction of a greatly increased world GDP based on current trends barring mass suicide by net zero). Stern estimated the cost of mitigation at only 1% of GDP. The figures should probably be reversed if mitigation means NZ insanity.
A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product
The researchers show they have a sense of humor. That is laugh-out-loud funny. One of the big fallacies of climate “science” is false precision.
“Economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.”
– William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870)
” laugh-out-loud funny “
Unlike the weekday comics, the Guardian funnies are in color.
“the researchers found,“
Where in the bin ???
Sabine Hesselfelder – a straightforward German physicist has a video on youtube about why she left academia. It’s all about the money-go-round, that grants are given for topic of the day study, that results must match what the grant-holder wants. I realised that I heard the same story in Climate – the Movie. And that’s why there are so many “climate scientists” today. Go against the flow and you are out of work.
Sabine Hossenfelder
”economic damage six time worse from climate change solutions than thought”
There it’s fixed.
This utter garbage appears to have cherrypicked a range of dates when there was faster economic expansion-basically catch-up growth after the war-and falsely attributed it, with no evidence whatsoever, to a “stable climate” .
A finer example of correlation not equalling causation, it would be hard to find.
For anyone interested, here is a brief explanation of the (flawed) reasoning here. There is a considerable literature on how weather shocks affect GDP. It is an obvious issue of importance for countries with large weather-dependent economic activities – agriculture, etc. The usual method is examine the issue by combining data for many countries over time and apply statistical methods which extract information from variations across time and across countries. Most such analyses suggest low estimates for the effect of global warming on world GDP, though shocks for individual countries may be substantial. This is because there is a large amount of averaging in the impact of shocks across countries.
What this paper does is to try to explain variations in global GDP as a function of global weather or climate. They use time series methods that (a) are completely unsuitable for this kind of data, and (b) utterly ignore well-known sources of weather shocks. On the first point they claim that weather shocks produce very large impacts 6 to 8 years after the shock without any evidence of why or how. [Their explanations are just spurious speculation.] On the second, there is not a single reference in the whole paper to El Nino or ENSO and other well-known cyclical weather patterns. What they are, in fact, doing is ascribing all of the effects of weather oscillations to climate change.
Analyses of the impact of weather and climate on economic variables are highly contentious. They are very difficult to carry out for various reasons of both statistical modelling and data collection. I know because I have done it in the past and there are some very good econometricians who have worked on the issue. This paper is striking in that the authors appear to know almost nothing about prior work or indeed about anything beyond a very narrow range of work carried out by climate modellers and friendly macroeconomists.
That, of course, has never stopped the Guardian and other similar outlets giving great publicity to complete nonsense.
They have journeyed into mysticism.
‘Climate change’ is not force; it cannot be a cause. It is a result (if it were actually happening).
Ascribing to climate change is the literal equivalent of ascribing to “An act of God.” Climate science is religion.
The real flaw in all this drivel, is it assumes no mitigation or adaptation and no response from nature. We have central heating and air-con, plus selectively bred crops and animals to adapt to changes in climate over the many years.
Nature has created new plant growth around deserts, an area equivalent to the size of the USA because of increased CO2 concentration in the air, and crop yields have increased for the same reason, feeding more people per acre of land than ever before.
The effects of climate change – such as it might be – is only considered to have negative outcome, and ‘stopping’ it no social or economic cost whatsoever – like lockdown and shutting down the World’s economy during the CoVid scam has no cost just benefit.
I have read the study, and found it baffling and unconvincing. It’s interesting to note that it’s a pre-print that hasn’t yet been peer reviewed. Given the corruption of the peer review process, that doesn’t bother me, but it’s amusing to observe that climate alarmists are quick to denigrate any sceptical papers that haven’t gone through peer review. Different rules apparently apply when a non-peer reviewed paper can allow the Guardian to lead with a scary headline.
The NBER nominally has some kind of prior filter – or it did in the past – but I doubt very much that one has been applied in this case. Whatever the substance of the paper there is enough technical nonsense to satisfy most reviewers and many will approve of the message that the social cost of carbon is very high.
At a purely technical level there is an astonishing omission. How path-dependent is the model. In a simple cyclical random disturbance with a zero mean but different standard deviations to the path of climate. Common sense and theory would suggest that the long run paths of the model should be identical. That condition should be imposed on the estimation. There is no sign that it has either been recognised or tested.
I suspect that the underlying time series model is either unstable or has high levels of hysteresis which would generate the results described. Anyone can produce any results with such a model.
This is a chilling example of the garbage these so called experts will produce in exchange for being paid a lot of money by the people who are looking to profit from the climate change hysteria.
You can sum it up by saying, ‘Well, they would say that wouldn’t they- it’s what they are paid to do’!
The same thing can be said about almost every expert and media report which supports the message they are spreading.
The Guardian is one of the useful idiots who refuse to believe they are being gamed by powerful global forces working towards a new authoritarian world order. They really have overdosed on the Kool-Aid.
Kept afloat (like some unflushable turd) by the ‘tax efficient’ sale of Auto Trader. Supported Confederates during US civil war too of course.
https://order-order.com/2014/01/21/guardian-sells-autotrader-for-1-billion-moment-of-truth-for-guardianistas/
And the money of the world’s most evil man, Bill Gates.
i doubt that even Nicholas Stern or Michael Mann would take this piffle seriously
What unit of measure is ‘previously thought’?
Conjecture about the future is not research, it’s astrology, palmistry, tasseography.
Cross my palm.with silver… lots of.
The Guardian ceased to be anything remotely resembling a media outlet decades ago.
It tells its disciples what they want to hear and sadly believe the drivel themselves.
Money,money,money – it drives almost everything and particularly corruption
The biggest “drags” on the UK economy since 1900 have been war and incompetent direction at the highest level.
The biggest drags have been Left wing policies such as widespread nationalisation.
161 articles? Quite an aficionado.
So previous research was utterly and completely wrong. By a factir of six. But how can that be? How could climate research be wrong? Is it not settled and infallible? And if it can be wrong by that sort of factor, it can be wrong by that sort of factor the other way too – that’s basic logic. So perhaps the cost is actually six times lower than we thought.
Notice the false language of certainty. Key modifiers like might, could, possibly, suggests are completely absent. These are the standard cautious language of science and shouod be of science reporting. I call what they do a fallacy of false certainty.
In science modeling only shows us what is possible given the assumptions of the model.
Correct. People frequently call it GIGO, which it is not. GIGO is based on bad input data. The assumptions of the the model have nothing to do with the input data. In fact, even with good input data, the output will still be useless.
Your “fallacy of false certainty” is akin to begging the question fallacy, which we often see in climate reporting. Assertions to matters which are not on the record, expecting us to just accept what they say.
Petitio principii.
So yet again a computer “model” has predicted Armageddon, the End, the arrival of the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Well, in my time I have done some very clever computer “modelling”, within the workplace I could very accurately predict my sales and profits using historic data, rolling 12month actual results with the premise that IF nothing changed then sales, profits, overheads etc would be XYZ, however, IF things changed, then you planned to get over this. I also ran a program that clearly showed that had I invested £XXX I would have made millions, but I didn’t so I am not as rich as I predicted I would be.
All models rely on factual information, however, some are giving predictions to work with – I am not a millionaire is a fact, I will be a millionaire is a prediction- now dress the inputs up and guess what, Banks and Investors will be knocking on your door- you have accurately shown that you can take nothing and turn it into something.
Predictions are wishes and dreams, unbelievable that credence is given to them.
Calling or taking this kind of modeling as a prediction is yet another fallacy. At best it is exploring possibilities.
Yes, it’s another astounding thing because EVERYONE knows weather forecasts are only good for two or three days, yet people believe weather forecasts for decades out.
Yes the climate modelers suppress and ignore the intrinsic unpredictability but that is not unique to climate stuff. There is no money in unpredictability. I used to lecture on this and had just given one at the Naval Research Lab in 1992 when someone mentioned the new UN Climate Treaty. I have been tracking and fighting alarmism ever since.
Weather is chaotic and chaotic systems exhibit what is called strange statistics in that the averages are constantly changing. Given climate is average weather it must change all the time. Nothing causes these changes except the variability of the weather. You will not find this fundamental fact in an IPCC report even though it is well known in nonlinear physics.
Given climate is average weather it must change all the time.
Actually, no. Indeed, climate doesn’t change, that’s why it’s of value to us. No matter what kind of crazy weather occurs over decades, climate tells us what we can expect.
No climate on earth has changed in over a hundred years. UK’s climate, Cfb (Köppen), hasn’t changed since the end of the LIA, ~1850, even though its weather changes hourly.
I think you will find that the 30 year averages for temp, rain, wind, clouds, etc. constantly change.
But the averages oscillate within relatively fixed boundaries which may be what you are referring to. Chaos is a form of stability the price of which is internal unpredictability.
Old joke: Stranger asks farmer “Think it will rain?” Farmer thinks a bit and replies “It always has.”
If they admitted the economic damage from Net Zero is 6 times worse than they thought we might be getting somewhere. But it would still likely be an underestimate.
What we are witnessing among supposed experts and scientists, along with dimwitted journalists, is the agreed-upon lie. As one travels up the ladders of power, there is more understanding that it is all a lie, but a lie with a fantastic purpose as offered up by Michael Mann recently: The “carrying capacity” of the planet is one billion people.
Mann, of course, who appears to me to be a hired gun, presumes that he’ll still be around after the purge. Not so fast, Mike …