Paris and London flooded? Wonder if that would make people wake up? Doubt it. Maybe when they walk into a half-emty supermarket they might get it. But, of course, it will be way too late by then.
Anyway let’s hope this isn’t as bad as it is looking now.
People won’t wake up, they will turn to the traditional solutions to fear- strong men autocrats, scapegoats, religion, etc.
New York flooded years ago, remember. Hurricane Sandy, 2012. Killed 43 people in NYC alone, and many more in the Caribbean.
It didn’t change anything.
Nordhaus’ method of connecting climate to economics via GDP is another example why our species has no long term future.
Apart from the problem that GDP misleads as a measure of real progress or wealth, human wellbeing in the long term is only feasible within an economic framework that doesn’t disrupt & destroy climate and other ecological systems on which our species are entirely dependant for our lives, livelihoods and welfare.
It’s not a trade-off of GDP v climate, the problem is stop disrupting climate cycles or else our economy collapses and we don’t have a planet that is conducive to human life.
Economically, a major weather disaster is a boost to GDP. All that economic activity associated with rebuilding.
See, quantitative economics has all the answers! More bushfires, storms, floods needed!
What if it destroys crops and machinery?
In reality, natural disasters are terrible economics, because they destroy assets, productive capacity, and wealth.
But in the short term of GDP, they often appear as a short downturn (during the event) and then a surge in economic activity as money is spent on the recovery.
Longer term factors such as reductions in net wealth, and higher insurance premiums, don’t get picked up (or are lost in the noise) in the numbers, and so are not considered in the economic analysis.
There’s also productive agricultural land which will never produce food crops or animal fodder for centuries, if ever.
Here, regeneration of eucalypts and other native plants is wonderful after a bushfire.
But in parts of Indonesia, the ash and lava flow from volcanic eruptions have destroyed productive land, including that of subsistence farmers and other small landholders making a living from selling their produce. Tsunamis have had similar consequences.
And the commercialisation of palm oil has destroyed environmental protection of native vegetation. It used to be the case that officers in the Indonesian army were paid in land grants , much of it in palm plantations.
The last few months have been extraordinary, though. I was thinking that after September that things may settle down a bit, but there has been no such sign. Acapulco, Scotland, Northern England and Yemen, etc. And then there was this:
Two Cat 5 cyclones in the last week! One developing faster than ever before, and the other one the earliest by about 7 weeks!
Extraordinary times, and largely extraordinary silence by our media outlets.
Our planet is screaming at us.
And when the media does report on climate it is just more hopium. I mean, this article basically says we’ve already breached 1.5 but there’s still a chance if we get our skates on. Please.
So not the warm waters in the Eastern Pacific Ocean caused by El Nino? If not THE only reason, perhaps the main reason for increases of tropical storms recently
El Niño is very likely the driver of the timing of the storms, climate change is expected to be driving more energy into the system and making the storm systems that do occur become more intense.
Clearly he didn’t model the GDP impact of the workforce availability decline and reduced consumer demand following a mass starvation event.
Nordhaus is probably nuts about fungibility eg farmers and all human labour are replaceable with machines that only eat fossil fuels;
and robots don’t drive up costs by demanding better working conditions.
This ■■■■ was our Prime Minister. Fark you, Australia.
Updated November 1, 2023 — 3.59pmfirst published at 1.40pm
London: Former prime minister Tony Abbott has told a right-wing conference he had never believed in human-driven climate change as he vowed the “climate cult” would one day be defeated.
Abbott was speaking at the launch of the Institute of Public Affairs’ new paper Energy Security is National Security, held on the sidelines of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.
He revealed that when he had professed to support cutting carbon emissions as prime minister and leader of the Coalition, he had always added a disclaimer that it should not cost jobs or send dirtier forms of energy generation to countries that were not as serious about reducing greenhouse gases.
“And when I was feeling particularly bold, I would add things like this, I would say, ‘you know, 10,000 years or so back we had an Ice Age, that was rather dramatic climate change, but presumably that had nothing to do with mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions’,” Abbott said.
Abbott, who was [appointed to the board of Fox Corporation] in late September as soon as Lachlan Murdoch took over from his father Rupert Murdoch as sole chairman, said he would point to the Medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age as further examples that climate had “nothing to do with mankind’s emissions”.
“So I think it is worth stating that the anthropogenic global warming thesis, at least in its more extreme forms, is both ahistorical and utterly implausible. And I think that needs to be repeated a little more,” he said.
According to NASA, 97 per cent of the world’s scientists agree that humans are causing both global warming and climate change.
“Scientific evidence continues to show that human activities, primarily the human burning of fossil fuels, have warmed Earth’s surface and its ocean basins, which in turn have continued to impact Earth’s climate,” an article on NASA’s website reads. “This is based on over a century of scientific evidence forming the structural backbone of today’s civilisation.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report found human activities are definitively responsible for all global warming since 1850.
Over 2019-20 summer, Australia was ravaged by unprecedented bushfires that burned more than 24 million hectares and killed 33 people.
Abbott was applauded by supporters in the room when he said: “The climate cult will inevitably be discredited, I just hope we don’t have to endure an energy catastrophe before that happens.”
He said the current government’s policy of reaching 82 per cent renewables by 2030 “was not just utterly irrational” but “actually impossible”.
Abbott said that when given the choice of cutting emissions or protecting the cost of living for voters, he had always chosen the latter.
He said Australian voters were not given this choice at the last election because both sides had signed up to net zero by 2050.
In response to Abbott’s comments, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said: “Tony Abbott and his ilk are responsible for a decade of catastrophic climate policy.
“That serious figures in the LNP, current and former, engage in this blatant climate change denial in 2023 tells us why the LNP is unfit to govern and will continue to be whilst destructive figures like Dutton and Abbott continue to call the shots.”
Campaigns to reach net-zero targets have been dialled down by some governments, including in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in September announced a series of U-turns on key targets to tackle climate change.
While Sunak said he was still “absolutely unequivocal” about reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, he wanted to take a “more pragmatic, proportionate and realistic approach”.
Sunak said governments “of all stripes” had not been “honest with the public” about the costs of net zero and delayed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035.
How weird is it to have people see this crap happening right in front of their face and sticking with their old views investments.
Good lord.
The number and intensity will increase…
Happens.
Oh but yeah but yeah but yeah but…El Nino?
Dude.
Duuuuuuude!!!
Low pressure front turns into a CAT 5 in 24 hours???
That’s some sci-fi crap.
Duuuuuude.
What a buffoon of a man. Don’t worry, it’s exactly what Dutton thinks as well
