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When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics

 His ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics.

Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia University, told me recently that Nordhaus's projections are "Wildly wrong." Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5 C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and "Safe boundaries" for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world, "It's difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that." Global population today stands at 7.6 billion, with 80 million people added every year.

To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists - the folks we call mainstream or neoclassical economists - have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth.

In DICE, the effect of a warmed climate is measured solely as a percentage loss in GDP. Growth of GDP is assumed to be "Exogenously determined," in the language of economics theory, meaning it will persist at a set rate over time regardless of climate shocks.

"Nordhaus's model doesn't fully take into account the fact that if we don't do more to avert climate change, climate change will affect growth rates," they told me in an email.

Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is "The part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change," but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a "Very large effect on the U.S. economy." It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends.

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/

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