Average Person Will Be 40% Poorer If World Warms By 4C, New Research Shows (theguardian.com) 120
Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people's wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer -- an almost four-fold increase on some estimates. The Guardian: The study by Australian scientists suggests average per person GDP across the globe will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C above pre-industrial levels. This is a much greater reduction than previous estimates, which found the reduction would be 1.4%.
Scientists now estimate global temperatures will rise by 2.1C even if countries hit short-term and long-term climate targets. Criticisms have mounted in recent years that a set of economic tools known as integrated assessment models (IAM) -- used to guide how much governments should invest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions -- have failed to capture major risks from climate change, particularly extreme weather events. The new study, in the journal Environmental Research Letters, took one of the most popular economic models and enhanced it with climate change forecasts to capture the impacts of extreme weather events across global supply chains.
Scientists now estimate global temperatures will rise by 2.1C even if countries hit short-term and long-term climate targets. Criticisms have mounted in recent years that a set of economic tools known as integrated assessment models (IAM) -- used to guide how much governments should invest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions -- have failed to capture major risks from climate change, particularly extreme weather events. The new study, in the journal Environmental Research Letters, took one of the most popular economic models and enhanced it with climate change forecasts to capture the impacts of extreme weather events across global supply chains.
Luckily, I am an American (Score:4, Funny)
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I have no idea how hot 4C is.
Don't worry. It's but a few degrees short of The Last of Us becoming reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
You will have a very real idea when Hollywood scripts are no longer comfortably sitting in fiction.
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That show was so good. If you haven't seen it, see it. Back on topic, after watching that clip, read this:
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2... [jhu.edu]
The show set Patient Zero in Indonesia. If they had set it 5 miles north in Singapore, it would have been eerily prescient.
We currently don't have good anti-fungals for these adapted fungi, but I don't see a path to us becoming "clickers". That said, interesting fact, we're actually closely related to fungi, both being eukaryotes, rather than bacteria (prokaryotes) and v
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If you have any other questions you'd like me to answer helpfully, please let me know.
Re:Luckily, I am an American (Score:4, Informative)
No, it's 4 Kelvin because it's a delta, not an absolute value.
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Re:Luckily, I am an American (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no idea how hot 4C is.
It's the (yearly average) difference between Michigan and Florida.
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So we'll have iguanas in Michigan? GREAT!
Maybe grow mangoes in Georgia.
And in Florida we can make harnesses for the mosquitoes to till the rice paddy. giddyup little buggy!
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Your wife/girlfriend won't like a 4C change on the thermostat, in either direction.
Re: Luckily, I am an American (Score:2)
I'll ask her when she finishes splitting firewood.
Actuaries confirm (Score:3)
Actuaries, the people assessing risk for insurers, say the same. The report is here: https://actuaries.org.uk/plane... [actuaries.org.uk]
Economists essentially said "anything with a roof won't be affected" . And won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for it. And now thanks to Nordhaus, we're screwed policy-wise.
That's OK. (Score:5, Insightful)
A few billionaires will continue to increase their net worth, so it all works out just fine. We all need to suffer so the uber-wealthy can continue to prosper.
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Right, I was going to say that 40% is an underestimate because billionaires will exploit climate change to become richer still.
The important thing is to know that decision makers are not average, they are rich. The rich do not care about climate change or how much the average person suffers, they care about what they get out of it. Many of them view life as zero sum, that the average person suffering means they are getting ahead.
How much poorer will the average person be ... (Score:2, Insightful)
after 4 years of Trump's presidency ? NB: I am talking about the common man, not one of his billionaire mates.
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If 5% of global GDP is spent on reducing emissions?
Really, I want to know?
LAMBO (Score:4, Funny)
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Sorry, but you've seen Happy Days - you only get a motorbike.
We're American damn it! We only get skis and a shark jump.
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Our education system has truly failed.
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Cold enough to flash-freeze Davos during the WEF? :-P
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A somewhat more serious answer to this: While there is unfortunately no temperature that will selectively stop our capitalist overlords from bleeding our civilizations dry, there are ideal temperatures for human labor and industrial processes. A relevant study:
https://laislanetwork.org/what... [laislanetwork.org]
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So if we cool the earth by 4C, will we be all 40% richer? What's the temperature need to be for everyone to get a lambo?
Just maintaining progress and not having to waste a lot of money on climate mitigation would kind of naturally take care of that. If you look at first Lamborghini, in 1964, and compare its performance to what you can get for a middling new car price now... other than status, I'll bet you'd rather have the modern middling-priced new car.
The ideal would be to have a 0 C change. (Score:2)
It's a rate of change problem. Changing the average annual temperature quickly is difficult for our economy to adapt to. Mostly our agriculture economy.
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It's more than rate of change. Well, unless you're talking about multiple-millennia. Different crops have different temperature preferences and different moisture preferences. Raising papayas in Arkansas wouldn't even help compensate for it being too hot to raise wheat in Kansas. (OTOH, corn would probably continue to do well.)
A hotter world is probably going to require a switch from wheat to corn and rice. But corn requires lots of extra fertilizers, and rice seems to require a lot more water. (I say
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in some range of temperatures you can find the necessary humidity, temperature, an soil moisture to grow a crop. If we keep moving where that is, then we're constantly searching for new farm land because our old farm land is no longer suitable.
Corn grows on the equator. It's something we'll be growing a great deal of when we face higher global temperatures. But corn fields might have to move to a higher elevation to grow it with some milder temperatures and better rainfall. So you lose a lot of farmland in
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Make sure the factor in the added tariff costs of that Lambo in the US while you're doing those climate change calculations, as they're about to cost 25% more than they did a month ago.
April 1 (Score:2, Funny)
These April Fools threads are getting out of hand.
"according to a new study" (Score:5, Insightful)
(*) Although Trump and Musk are working hard on this.
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Global warming is indeed the biggest current threat to mankind (*), but it is always sensible to ignore any post that begins "according to a new study".
Too bad I don't have mod points, this is insightful.
The way science works is, don't credit a result until it's replicated, or at a minimum has withstood scrutiny by people knowledgable about the field.
(And... the phrase "people knowledgable about the field" is not synonymous with "people posting on slashdot".)
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Re:"according to a new study" (Score:5, Interesting)
Global warming is indeed the biggest current threat to mankind
It's not. Climate change is a threat to our wealth and has the potential to reduce human population by a non-trivial percentage, but it doesn't really threaten us with extinction, unlike some other threats. For a good overview of existential threats to humanity (including climate change) I recommend The Precipice [amazon.com].
Although Trump and Musk are working hard on this.
Although they're doing a lot of damage, they really don't rate on the scale of threats to humanity. They're part of a global ongoing decline in democracy which is very harmful but not existential -- and far easier to reverse than climate change.
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I call that a large threat to mankind. I did not say "existential threat".
Trump and Musk are playing crazy games that could end in World War 3.
Re: "according to a new study" (Score:1)
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I think global warming has a good chance of collapsing Western societies. I call that a large threat to mankind. I did not say "existential threat".
You did say "biggest", and it can't be bigger than existential threats with even moderate probability.
Also, I disagree that climate change might collapse Western societies. Western societies are actually the ones best equipped to protect themselves from it... and from the waves of refugees from regions that aren't so well off.
Trump and Musk are playing crazy games that could end in World War 3.
Agreed. However, I think nuclear war is less likely to end humanity than AI, though civilization probably wouldn't survive. Einstein's quote about WW IV comes to mind.
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While I agree that asteroids, AI. pandemics, nuclear war etc all loom large, climate change is the only one that is here right now, that we can see, and that has a roadmap.
AI has a roadmap, we just don't know the timeframe (could be months, is more likely at least a few years, almost certainly isn't more than a decade or three), and don't know if some deus ex machina might save us. Though I think that last possibility is very unlikely.
Nuclear war, sadly, is looking dramatically more likely. With Trump making threatening noises against NATO allies, it's clear that Europe can no longer count on the US nuclear umbrella, which means that France and the UK will need to change th
According to a new study (Score:2)
According to a new study, we're boned!
Q.E.D
Every day is April Fools day at The Guardian (Score:2, Troll)
April Fool's Day jokes are indistinguishable from regular The Guardian content.
Re: Every day is April Fools day at The Guardian (Score:2)
TBH, The Grauniad did try to make me 40% poorer with their donation popup.
Sheer bollocks (Score:2)
if things warm to 4 degrees above normal most life will be extinct.
But nobody ever said The Guardian was a reputable rag.
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That's a gross misstatement. It is, however, quite plausible that most life we care about will go extinct. I doubt that Chordata or even Mammalia will be endangered. For that matter, I doubt that Homo Sapiens will be endangered. But they may lose a significant fraction of their numbers. (If civilization collapses because of climate stress, probably over 90%. But probably less than 98%.)
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Maybe some very small pockets or extremophiles will survive, but it is not OUR right do choose their fate, nor is there any coming back from this. This civilisation will be done in 5-15yrs.
At 2 degrees rise the base of our food chain will be unable to survive and be functionally extinct - Coral Reef ecosystems .. Gone.
Even at 2 degrees phytoplankton and oceanic chemistry will be irreversably altered and acidified.
Larger ocean creatures therefore will have no food, they will already be closing in on extincti
Meanwhile (Score:2)
The wealthy will see it as an opportunity to buy up more real estate from their air conditioned, mini reactor powered, island bunkers.
Wow, those people were rich (Score:2)
Trust the models (Score:1)
I'm sure the economic models are just as accurate as the climate models.
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Based on historic evidence, economic models are considerably less accurate than the climate models. Both have been repeatedly tweaked to be excessively optimistic.
Let me make a wild guess (Score:2)
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It's a plausible wild guess, but wrong. The economic study modeled things like the GDP, and didn't consider individual humans. The climate study did silly things like assuming that countries would keep they pledged change.
Excellent metrics (Score:2)
I really do love these sort of figures. Often based on shoddy data, inaccurate assessments or just plain wrong in considering life is static.
Remember when the internet was going to run out of bandwidth? If bandwidth demand continued to grow at rate X and supply is rate Y which is lower than X then congestion, everything gets "stuck"...but it didn't happen.
This is like a bath. If you keep filling water at a constant rate the bath will overflow at some point. Of course as we notice some signs of issues we
Global Ecological Tilt & Demographic Collapse (Score:2)
Both pretty much guaranteed at this point. I hope modern civilization can survive anyway and not go off the rails and fall into some bizarre post-apocalyptic dark age (again).
There is a cost to CO2 (Score:2)
What amazes me is that some people still think that emitting CO2 should be unlimited and free. With that logic people will continue to use coal to generate electricity even if it's dumb.
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People will even continue to breathe.
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Breathing is not causing global warming. The burning of fossil fuel is. At the same time it's causing many problems such as reducing air quality. You know, the air people want to continue to breathe.
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It's traditional. People have been burning things since before they were people. Trying to change something that traditional (and which has that many obvious benefits) is difficult.
The costs don't show up until you scale things WAY up.
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I'm not saying it should be banned. I'm just saying it should not be free. And yes, it is difficult to implement, but must still be done.
Ovious nonsenscal clickbait (Score:2)
is obvious
Global Economies (Score:2)
Ftom TFA:
But Neal said global heating would hit countries everywhere, because global economies are linked by trade.
"Not any more." - D. J. Trump
And thatâ(TM)s just from the PG&E bill (Score:1)
It will be even worse once you factor in necessary bribes to the still climate change denying, fascist government.
It's much worse in the long term (Score:1)
The summary left out a critical detail: that 40% estimate is for what the effect will be in the year 2100. They only estimated short term effects, but it doesn't stop then. In the long term, 4C of warming will lead to at least 5-10 meters of sea level rise, and possibly much more. That will annihilate whole countries and force almost all coastal communities to be abandoned. Many parts of the tropics will experience regular heat waves that surpass the maximum survivable temperature for humans and most ot
I used to be upset by the Guardian /. love affair (Score:2)
Now I treasure these regular posts of nonsense for the entertainment value. If it's Tuesday, we get a Guardian cross-post. Somebody has to pay the bills around here.
No problem (Score:2)
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I'm going to buy futures in the Yanomami Sovereign Wealth fund. With all the foreign direct investment they are getting for not cutting down trees, it's bound to skyrocket in value any time now.
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Hocus Pocus with numbers (Score:1)
Predictions are hard... (Score:2)
...especially about the future.
In times of normal technological advances, it's really hard to predict the future.
As AI increases in power and adoption, the future is becoming increasingly impossible to predict.
One definition of the tech "singularity" is the point at which the future becomes unpredictable.
That point is now
Well at least ... (Score:2)
The Guardian is clickbait trash like Fox News (Score:2)
Just so you know.
Sounds like a solution for (Score:2)
wealth inequality some folks are worried about.
Deflation in other words (Score:2)
40% of nothing is nothing (Score:2)
More garbage from The Guardian. (Score:1)
The Guardian is not a news outlet, they abandoned that pretense years ago and you can see it at the bottom of every page.
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Average person will be 40% more sweaty and probably die 40% faster, so 40% more poor is just a given.
Bullshit studies are bullshit because the audience cannot discern.
Define "average person" for me. On a global scale that includes those Third Worlds everyone in the First World assumes about, but has no actual fucking idea.
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Good news, they just divided the estimated amount of wealth by the estimated number of people in two scenarios.
Unfortunately, my tendency is to view it as bullshit, not because of the climate science, but because of the economic models, where mitigated climate change is depicted as a simple differential equation of reduced exponential growth and unmitigated climate change is rendered as the same thing but with a new factor in the form of supply chain disruption estimation, which is essentially derived from
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Unfortunately, my tendency is to view it as bullshit, not because of the climate science, but because of the economic models,
I'm not sure if I would quite call it "bullshit," but I'm dubious about economic models of thing that are this far out. The uncertainty is simply too high. I also note that the opening phrase "Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people's wealth, according to a new study" basically says that other economic studies don't predict this bad a result. So, which is it? This study is right, and every other study was wrong? Or other studies are right, and this one is wr
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Here is the study [iop.org]. Their whole point is that the economic models aren't realistic, and they incorporated more factors to make them more realistic. Here is the abstract.
Projections of macroeconomic damage from future climate change tend to suggest mild to moderate impacts. This can lead to welfare-optimal climate policies in integrated assessment models (IAMs) that recommend very slow emissions reductions over the coming decades, in sharp contrast with the ambitions of the Paris Agreement. These econometric models assume that weather impacting a single country is all that affects the economy of that country. We examine whether the addition of global weather conditions in the empirical modelling of economic growth affects the projections of the impact of climate change on global gross domestic product (GDP). In effect, we explore whether the interconnectedness of the global economy makes individual countries vulnerable to weather changes that impact other countries. Using three influential econometric models we add global weather to the regressions. We find that this leads to significant worsening of the projections of macroeconomic damage for given future emissions scenarios. Damage to world GDP in 2100 under SSP5-8.5, averaged across both econometric models and climate models increases from ~11% under models without global weather to ~40% if global weather is included. Further, we demonstrate that when the damage function used in a recent IAM is estimated from empirical models augmented with global weather conditions, they reduce the welfare-optimal amount of climate change from ~2.7C to ~1.7C which is consistent with the Paris Agreement targets. Our results highlight the need for econometric modelling and climate science's understanding of extreme events to be integrated much more consistently to ensure the costs of climate change are not underestimated.
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If you think you have immigration problems now, wait until a billion people or more are trying to get away from climate change induced disasters.
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If you think you have immigration problems now, wait until a billion people or more are trying to get away from climate change induced disasters.
By then we'll have fusion reactors, 80% efficient solar panels, and super efficient desalination! World saved!!
The methodology is [probably] flawed (Score:2)
The methodology, as far as I can infer from the article, is they took GDP of various nations. Worked out how much it temperature change would affect it. Then made the leap that on average (rather than the "average person") there would be an economic loss of 40%.
I think if you look at the median individual, rather than average. You'll find the top 50% of people not taking such a big loss. And the bottom 50% taking a much larger loss. With a significant number of individuals losing everything and being destit
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That's nothing to do with what they did. Here is the study [iop.org]. From the abstract, which describes what they actually did:
These econometric models assume that weather impacting a single country is all that affects the economy of that country. We examine whether the addition of global weather conditions in the empirical modelling of economic growth affects the projections of the impact of climate change on global gross domestic product (GDP). In effect, we explore whether the interconnectedness of the global economy makes individual countries vulnerable to weather changes that impact other countries.
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"Average person" is anyone who is not in the top 1% (who will always get richer).
Everyone else is screwed.
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The global top 1% is not as rich as you think. In the USA, a single person earning $63k after tax per year puts you in the top 1%. Double that if you are a couple.
https://www.givingwhatwecan.or... [givingwhatwecan.org]
When you are talking about the private-jet rich, that's more like the 0.01%.
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Top earners across the United States earn at least six figures, with an average income of over $160,000 for those in the top 10% in 2021.
Earners in the top 1% need to make $1 million annually in states like California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Washington.
In West Virginia, the top 1% earners need only $435,302.
https://www.investopedia.com/p... [investopedia.com]
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You are confusing the top 1% of the USA (or even in certain states), and the global top 1%. I was referring to the global top 1%.
There are a lot of people in the third world bringing the average down.
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To be in the top 1% worldwide, you need a net worth of approximately $871,320. In terms of income, the threshold can vary significantly by location, with some areas requiring over $1 million annually to qualify.
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To be in the top 1% worldwide, you need a net worth of approximately $871,320.
Possibly, what is your source?
A lot of people don't realize they are the global top 1%, and imagine this is a club of private jeters.
In terms of income, the threshold can vary significantly by location, with some areas requiring over $1 million annually to qualify.
No matter where you live, I'd say $1 million annual income puts you in the top 1%, maybe even 0.1%. I'm not talking about the top 1% of your country or region, but the global top 1% here.
It's quite easy to get a net worth of $871k when you have an income of $1 million. Just save $300k/year for 3 years. An living with "only" $500k per year isn't hard, anywhere in the world.
Re:just that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Define "average person" for me.
If you need that defined for you, you're far too ignorant to participate in the topic.
Actually, no, this turns out to.be a critical question to ask.
And the exact wording also makes a difference. Dividing the total wealth in the world by the world population will give you the average wealth per person, but "average wealth per person" is not the same as "wealth per average person."
(If this is not obvious, consider a case of a hundred people, 99 with assets of $1000, and one with a million dollars. The average wealth per person is $11,000, but an average person has wealth of $1000.)
For wealth of an average person, you have to figure out how they define an average person. Since the study is an economic study, it's most likely that they mean a person of average income, or possibly of average wealth.
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There are different types of average so I added the appropriate types in parentheses to your quote above.
I think it's time to retire the word "average" from the language for being too vague.
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"Mean" and "median" have precise definitions but many people are too ignorant to understand these so the popular term is the imprecise "average".
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Statistically, average and mean should really be precisely the same. The problem with almost all uses of statistics these days is that even supposed experts don't seem to stick to any precise meaning or understand what that meaning is.
In this case, it appears to be just meaningless math. They took the entire world GDP and divided it by the estimated number of people. This is a click-bait /propagandist trick to make dry numbers sound more interesting and relevant to the reader's own situation. But its doubt
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All of the studies of the economic effects of climate change have concluded that climate change is bad and will reduce GDP worldwide whereas investments in slowing climate change will increase GDP.
Jacobsen has done the most rigorous research in this area:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/20... [pv-magazine.com]
https://news.stanford.edu/stor... [stanford.edu]
https://www.rinnovabili.net/bu... [rinnovabili.net]
https://web.stanford.edu/group... [stanford.edu]
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We seem to be talking about different things. He claims that we can produce the same amount of energy at less cost. Theoretically that would reduce the GDP because the energy is worth less than the energy it replaces.
But the larger issue is the electric car problem. If you trade in your ICE car for an electric car you have not reduced emissions at all. The car you traded in will just burn gas for someone else with no change in emissions. You need to junk the ICE car to reduce emissions. But then the cost of
Here's the relevant bit (Score:2, Insightful)
The article is simplifying it to get attention but what it's saying is the entire global GDP is going to drop 40%.
Keep in mind that most of the global GDP is in the hands of first world countries like America. So it's going to hit America like a ton of bricks. I would expect a bigger hit to our well-being then e
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I think your analysis is correct, but I also think you're putting too much faith in an economic model. This is a plausible argument, but I don't think it capable of being more than that.
So I think it's safe to say (Score:2)
That does not seem like a debate we should be having but well, here we are.
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And the exact wording also makes a difference. Dividing the total wealth in the world by the world population will give you the average wealth per person, but "average wealth per person" is not the same as "wealth per average person."
Fair point. That led me to wonder what the actual paper says. From its abstract:
Damage to world GDP in 2100 under SSP5-8.5, averaged across both econometric models and climate models increases from 11% under models without global weather to 40% if global weather is included.
So the 40% figure applies to GDP, not average wealth per person or wealth of average person. TFS/TFA mangle this point and (erroneously) says it's the wealth of the average person.
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"Define "average person" for me."
If you need that defined for you, you're far too ignorant to participate in the topic.
Sa-WEEEET, FINALLY!!! See, I'm from Alabama, and I've been taking shots all my life for it, "Oh are you and your sister still married?". But here we are now, knowing that the average person in Alabama is exactly the same as the average person in California. And the average African...? EXACTLY the same as the average American. When it comes to average, they're all the same, that's why they're average. Right, guys? ....guys?
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So are you still married to your sister?
Junk science vs building a solar panel farm (Score:2)
Another example where this research money needs to be spent directly on building a solar panel farm.
It's beginning to look like having 20% of the village forever studying how to grow food and 80% of the village growing food, yet the entire village is slowly starving.
Some of that talk and research only 20% should switch to producing things other than talk or research.
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This study isn't about personal wealth. Sorry that's what the summary says. (Perhaps it's how the Guardian reported it, but it's still not what the study's about.) It's about the average GDP or some such.
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Average person will be 99% poorer if communism is implemented to stop climate change
We think you are hiding 1% from us, comrade. We will stop by and toss your commie block cell to find it. Or at least to make an example of you.