New IPCC report is out

[_EAllusion]

It's top takeaway on the possibility to avert the traditional boundary on catastrophic warming is worded to be optimistic, but really says can only be avoided with rapid economic change in all major industrialized nations on a scale similar to mobilizing for war in the next few years. That's plainly not gonna happen.

[_Chap]

It's top takeaway on the possibility to avert the traditional boundary on catastrophic warming is worded to be optimistic, but really says can only be avoided with rapid economic change in all major industrialized nations ...

Yup.

That's plainly not gonna happen.

Maybe. But that is not a criticism of the report, nr of the science that underpins it.

No-one gets to say "Hey climate scientists! Go back to your computers and come back with something more practical", any more than the captain of the Titanic could have said that to a crew member who saw the iceberg ahead and suggested a sudden change of course that might have led to some passengers falling out of their bunks.

What you say is, essentially, a criticism of the capacity of currently existing social and political systems to face up to and deal with threats to the basic conditions of their continued existence.

[_EAllusion]

I'm not critiquing the science of the report chap. I am being a little critical of the framing, but really I am just clarifying that the scenario it proposes to avoid catastrophic climate change is extremely unlikely to happen. Reaction to it should be Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber saying, "So you're saying there's a chance! Yeah!" A new carbon sequestration technology exploding on the scene and solving the problem is more feasible.

It's a very dire report. It should be page 1 news everywhere and dominate election coverage. That it doesn't reveals a brokenness that is at the root of why we know a WWII level re-industrialization isn't going to happen in the next few years.

[_Chap]

New study finds incredibly high carbon pollution costs – especially for the US and India. As a wealthy, warm country, the US would benefit from implementing a carbon tax to slow global warming


"In the United States, there sometimes seems to be a misconception that investments in climate change mitigation are charitable acts...

On the other hand, our analysis demonstrates that ... the US is very consistently in the top 3 of country-level social costs of carbon – by this metric one of the biggest losers from climate change."

The social cost of carbon is a measure of the economic damages caused (via climate change) by each ton of carbon pollution that we produce today. It’s difficult to estimate because of physical, economic, and ethical uncertainties. For example, it’s difficult to predict exactly when various climate tipping points will be triggered, how much their damages will cost, and there’s also a question about how much we value the welfare of future generations (which is incorporated in the choice of ‘discount rate’).

In 2013, the Obama administration set the federal social cost of carbon estimate at $37 per ton of carbon dioxide (up from the previous estimate of $22). That was a conservative estimate – in recent years, research has pegged the value closer to $200 because recent research has shown that global warming slows economic growth, which makes it quite expensive. A majority of economists in a 2015 survey believed the federal estimate was too low, but Republicans have recently been trying to dramatically lower it anyway.

The Republican argument is twofold. First, that we should only consider domestic climate costs (the federal estimate is of global costs, because our carbon pollution doesn’t just hover in the air above America). Second, that instead of trying to stop climate change now, we should just save our money and let future generations pay for its costs (by using a high discount rate).

The social cost of carbon is much higher yet

A new study led by UC San Diego’s Katharine Ricke published in Nature Climate Change found that not only is the global social cost of carbon dramatically higher than the federal estimate – probably between $177 and $805 per ton, most likely $417 – but that the cost to America is around $50 per ton. That’s the second-highest in the world behind India’s $90, and is also higher than the current federal estimate for the global social cost of carbon.

That’s a remarkable conclusion worth repeating. Ricke’s team found that the cost of carbon pollution to just the United States is probably higher than its government’s current estimate of costs to the entire world. And the actual global cost is more than 10 times higher than the federal estimate. And yet Republican politicians think that estimate should be much lower.

The study

I asked Ricke to describe her team’s approach in this study:

To calculate social cost of carbon, you need to answer four questions in sequence:
1. How would the economy change with no climate change (including GHG emissions)?
2. How does the Earth system respond to emissions of carbon dioxide?
3. How does the economy respond to changes in the Earth system?
4. How should we value losses today vs. in (for example) 100 years?
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The team answered these questions using four ‘modules’: a socio-economic module to answer the first question, a climate module to address the second, a damages module to investigate the third, and a discounting module to tackle the fourth.

Ricke further described the team’s approach in a ‘behind the paper’ article for Nature:

The idea was to combine an approach to analyzing the climate effect of a marginal emission of carbon dioxide that Ken Caldeira and I had recently developed, with a climate damages model described in what was then a working paper by Marshall Burke and collaborators. My co-author Massimo Tavoni pointed out that by combining these two tools, we could produce the first comprehensive, country-level estimates of the social cost of carbon.

The US is at the ideal economic temperature

I wrote about the referenced Burke paper in 2015. That study detailed the relationship between a country’s average temperature and its per capita GDP, finding a sweet spot around 13°C (55°F). That’s the optimal temperature for human economic productivity. Economies in countries with lower average temperatures like Canada and Russia would benefit from additional warming, but it would slow economic growth for nations closer to the equator with hotter temperatures.

The United States is currently right near the peak temperature, whereas many European countries like Germany, the UK, and France are 3–5°C cooler, and a bit below the ideal economic temperature. So, continued global warming is worse for the US economy than Europe’s.

China’s social cost of carbon is lower despite a similar temperature and GDP to America’s because its economy is growing fast, meaning that it would benefit from investing its money now rather than spending it on cutting carbon pollution, at least relative to a more developed country like the US. But China’s social cost of carbon is still about $26 per ton. India’s $90 is the highest because of its combination of a hot climate, high GDP (6th in the world), and anticipated continued growth leading to large future damages.


The high US carbon cost is also a surprising result because research has shown that poorer countries are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. But the US has the highest GDP of any country, so it has the most to lose. This conclusion is also consistent with the recent Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond paper finding that global warming will significantly slow American economic growth. As Ricke explained, the US would therefore benefit from a carbon tax:

In the United States, there sometimes seems to be a misconception that investments in climate change mitigation are charitable acts. Because climate change presents a more existential threat to developing countries, the argument is that having historically contributed the most CO2 to the atmosphere, the US should reduce its emissions in order to reduce the impacts of these past actions on others.

On the other hand, our analysis demonstrates that the idea that the biggest beneficiaries of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by the US would be other countries is a myth. Our results suggest that based on pure self-interest, the US should be willing to pay around $40/ton to avoid an emission of CO2. What’s more, the US is very consistently in the top 3 of country-level social costs of carbon – by this metric one of the biggest losers from climate change.
So, America is the country with the largest historical carbon emissions (and thus the most culpability for climate change), is among the countries that would benefit most from slowing global warming, and yet is the only country whose government rejects the Paris climate agreement.

[_EAllusion]

The majority of top US newspapers didn't mention the IPCC report on their homepages, including some cities under significant threat from climate change:

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/ ... ome/221608

[_DoubtingThomas]

The majority of top US newspapers didn't mention the IPCC report on their homepages, including some cities under significant threat from climate change:

I told you overturning Roe vs Wade is a bigger threat.

[_Xenophon]

The majority of top US newspapers didn't mention the IPCC report on their homepages, including some cities under significant threat from climate change:

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/ ... ome/221608

At least you know about the piece of toilet paper/tissue that hitched a ride on AF1, amirite?

[_Some Schmo]

The majority of top US newspapers didn't mention the IPCC report on their homepages, including some cities under significant threat from climate change:

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/ ... ome/221608

At least you know about the piece of toilet paper/tissue that hitched a ride on AF1, amirite?

LOL

I think it was Colbert who said, "That's pretty embarrassing for the toilet paper." I believe he also mentioned that it was actually the supplemental FBI report on Kavanaugh.

[_Maksutov]

LOL

I think it was Colbert who said, "That's pretty embarrassing for the toilet paper." I believe he also mentioned that it was actually the supplemental FBI report on Kavanaugh.

I thought it was Trump's copy of the Constitution.

[_DoubtingThomas]

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040,

In 2040 we are going to remember that the Republican party was the anti-science party.