University Of Exeter Actuarial Study; w/o Huge Emission Cuts, Half Of Global GDP Will Go Away By 2070

[hatrack]

EDIT

DOERING: One of the really interesting or attention grabbing things about your report is that it really drills down and looks at the numbers here in terms of potential hit to global GDP. You find that there's an up to 50% loss in global GDP between 2070 and 2090, I mean, that's just a staggering number. Why is that figure so high, and what is at risk economically?

LENTON: Well, the figure is so high because I'm not the only climate scientist who would tell you that if we go to three degrees centigrade of warming later this century, which is roughly where we're heading on current policies, or, if we're unlucky, and the climate is more sensitive, and that turns out to be four degrees C, or even more, well, we see such fundamental changes in the habitability of large areas of the planet that we find it hard not to conclude that there could be some kind of major social disruption breakdown, and thus an economic breakdown. Perhaps you could think of it also like a 50/50 chance of losing everything or having a major social collapse, because you've got to be careful here. I mean, economists, some of them, have already responded saying, oh, 50% reduction is not so bad if we're going to be three or seven times richer later this century. But what we're really highlighting is a major loss of economy and societies and productive capability.

DOERING: And by the way, why was it important for you and your colleagues to focus on GDP?

LENTON: Well, actually, we would rather not, I suppose I would rather not frame the results in terms of GDP, because GDP is well known to be a really flawed measure of human progress, shall we say, or utility or well being. But given that everybody, or culture in general, seems to be speaking this narrow economic language, we felt it was perhaps in order to get the message across, important to stress impacts on GDP, even realizing how flawed a measure it is. But one can get a sense of the the risks to capital and to productivity just by observing today there's large scale withdrawal of insurance from real estate, and real estate is what props up the economy, as we all observed in 2007-8, when there was a financial crisis because of real estate values and expectations were mispriced.

DOERING: Yeah, I mean, and thinking back to 2007 and 2008 that recession that followed, that was a pretty bad time for the world economy, and we might be heading for much worse, it sounds like you're saying,

LENTON: Yeah, we're saying, you can certainly see scenarios where things could be a lot worse. So yeah, we're looking, we're really trying to look here at existential, you might say, risks to the viability of life or economy as we know it.

DOERING: So of course, we're talking about potentially huge economic toll... what are the climate risks that we run as we continue to change the climate?

LENTON: Well, we're probably all now aware that there was a big uptick in climate extreme events, and we've all just seen some good candidate examples at LA wildfires and last year Valencia flooding. But in the broader sense, we're risking crossing tipping points in the climate, which would mean that we trigger a self-propelling, often rapid and hard to reverse change in some major bits of the climate that are doing good things for us at the moment but will be causing trouble if they tip and that means, like the loss of major ice sheets leading to much larger, faster and longer term sea level rise. It means tipping the loss of the Amazon rainforest and replacing it with some kind of degraded forest or savanna. And then there's tipping points in the circulation of the ocean or the atmosphere, or the two of them coupled together. For example, if we have a big tipping point in the Atlantic Ocean's great overturning circulation. We calculated the knock on consequences for production of major crops like wheat and maize would be like a 50% reduction in the viable area for growing those stable crops worldwide. So a huge food and water security crisis in other words.

EDIT

https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=25-P13-00008&segmentID=2

[Irish_Dem]

1. This is why the billionaires are stealing as much cash and resources as possible, while they can.

[AloeVera]

2. Galling that scientists are forced to talk the language of capitalism and GDP growth.

...When that is what caused the problem in the first place.

But they know that is the only language the predatory and rapacious among us will understand.

[AloeVera]

3. But since altruism and the common good are not their thing..

The grand and great-grand kids are on their own.