"21 April 2021

Optimum economic outturn is seen at 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming in 2100
Mortality due to extreme weather decreased spectacularly

Why did the EU invite the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg to speak in Brussels instead of the Nobel Prize winning climate economist William Nordhaus? That question is answered in an essay entitled Undue Climate Haste, which the CLINTEL Foundation is publishing today. The essay concludes: “The main message of this essay is that we are in no hurry and that panic is unwarranted. Climate change always deserves our attention, but the idea that we need to turn our energy supply upside down right now appears to be driven by emotion rather than reason.”

The EU has decided it wants to achieve net zero carbon emission by 2050. If they succeed, Europe will become the first ‘climate neutral’ continent. The media have mainly welcomed this ambition. Politicians claim that there will be many benefits of this policy: they say it will make the economy stronger and create jobs. But are these claims justified, by a cost-benefit analysis for example?

They are not, states the essay Undue Climate Haste. Remarkably the Nobel Prize (2018) winning climate economist William Nordhaus showed in his Nobel lecture in Stockholm that the ‘economic optimum’ for climate policy is to allow 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming in 2100. Economically, it is better to accept a certain amount of climate damage and to limit the cost of mitigation than the other way round: ambitious goals such as staying below 2 degrees or even 1.5 degrees are extremely costly.

Unfeasible
The climate goals of the EU are not only very costly, they are unachievable in practice. A simple calculation shows that in order to reach net zero emissions in 2050, the EU will have to deploy a new nuclear power station every week, from now until 2050. In total, 1650 new nuclear power stations would be needed. Yet today, 60 years after the first nuclear power plan went into production, there are only 450 such plants across the world.

The EU has a strong preference for ‘renewable’ energy sources, such as wind and solar, instead of nuclear. Achieving net zero with wind would require 450 new 2.5-MW turbines to be installed every two days until 2050; 82,000 windmills a year! Where would you place them all?

Unnecessary
The last part of the essay explains the EU’s haste towards its climate goal is totally unnecessary. Almost all important parameters indicate that climate change is a manageable phenomenon. We now have the technology and the wealth to cope.

The number of victims of extreme weather has decreased over the past century by more than 95%. Damage from such phenomena, corrected for the growth of the economy, has also declined slightly. Sea-level is rising, but very slowly and, moreover, no acceleration is apparent in long tide-gauge records.

Meanwhile there are strong indications that climate models, on which climate policy is largely based, are ‘oversensitive’, i.e. the real climate is less sensitive to CO2 than the climate models say it is. This means less future warming, and that CO2 reductions needed to stay below the 2 degrees target do not need to be so aggressive. Even if emissions stay above the 2020 level for the rest of the century, the 2-degree target remains in sight. Unfortunately, the climate science community rarely tells policymakers about these relatively new insights, preferring to discuss scenarios based on climate models.

The essay Undue Climate Haste was commissioned by the ECR Group of the European Parliament in Brussels."

https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ClintelECR_EssayNeedlessClimateHa...

Dnarever wrote on Apr 23^rd, 2021 at 2:00pm:



So now wiki is a valued scientific resource?

So Keen disagrees? And draws a parallel to GDP 20,000 years ago?

From your reference -

"Dr. Jason Hickel, who researches ecological economics, writes that "Many believe that the failure of the world’s governments to pursue aggressive climate action over the past few decades is in large part due to arguments that Nordhaus has advanced." One of his criticisms is that Nordhaus uses a very high discount rate which allows him to argue that we shouldn’t reduce emissions too quickly, because the economic cost to people today will be higher than the benefit of protecting people in the future.[38]"

"For social discounting, some countries also do this (notably France), while others, driven largely by the Arrow-Lind Principle, do not. Our median survey response of 2% is explicitly risk-free, comparable with the 1.2% yield offered by TIPS.  Nordhaus’ 4.5% rate is risk-adjusted (“I assume that the consumption beta on climate investments is close to one” Nordhaus 2014, p.280) as would be the rate in the oil and gas reserves sector. It is important to make sure that, whatever approach we take to incorporating risk premiums into social discount rates, we are comparing like-with-like."

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/04/is-nordhaus-discount-rate-really-too-low/

I know you don't like Watts but he posts stuff from others, not his own work.

So is there a risk in spending trillions of dollars, that could be better spent elsewhere, in fighting climate? Is it better to Mitigate or Adapt to any changes in climate?

Dnarever wrote on Apr 23^rd, 2021 at 2:00pm:


But as you like wiki I will quote some to you.

"According to a summary of the DICE and RICE models prepared by Stephen Newbold,[1] the earliest precursor to DICE was a linear programming model of energy supply and demand in two 1977 papers of William Nordhaus"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DICE_model
So not the late ones? Oh dear.

If we keep on Geo-engineering the Earth then real climate change may happen and god help us all.

The puppet masters will only invite their puppets, not people that will challenge their way of living.

lee wrote on Apr 24^th, 2021 at 3:05pm:


For the same reason your hero Nordhaus does (because you are not a complete moron).

Ah, I knew you'd disagree with me on that one.

lee wrote on Apr 23^rd, 2021 at 2:54pm:


Quote:


It is a very good quick overview to something not credible.

After his 2016 model while more realistic his economic outcome allows a 4 degree rise in temp (3.5 in the 2016 report) as optimal and 6 degrees likely.

Quote:


On Nordhaus's assessment economically doing nothing the model that kills several billion people is preferred to the cost of the current model for 1.5 degree. The only reason the current model is so difficult and expensive is because of doing nothing for 30 years - as projected it would be.

Economists hey !!!.

Is anyone going to take this guys view ?

I suspect that people still saying to do nothing or very little -  we are past that.

Lee you appear to think that not being able to predict exactly how bad our impact is going to be is a reason for more confidence in our ability to get away with polluting, not less.

You realise that is irrational, right?

You are being irrational Lee. Calm down and think about what you are saying. Not understanding the consequences of what you do is not a rational reason for greater confidence that you should do it. You do not realise it, but your silly questions support my case, not yours.