Nobel Prize Winner William Nordhaus vs. the IPCC on Climate Change

The author is using the term &quot;present-discounted value&quot; to describe the deaths of millions of people and the extinction of a major portion of the species of the earths.<p>You may have to put a dollar value on that sort of stuff to do economic calculations, but you have to recognize that&#x27;s what you&#x27;re doing.

This looks like an attempt to hijack the cred of a Nobel prize winner for the benefit of pushing the agenda of one &quot;Free Market Institute&quot; based at Texas Tech, in Lubbock Texas, the heart of Texas oil country. I would take everything in this article with a large grain of salt. Especially the characterization of positive steps toward addressing climate change as &quot;mitigations&quot; -- one person&#x27;s mitigation is another person&#x27;s highly sustainable renewable energy source that will create jobs at time of sale and installation, and pay dividends for decades to come.

Truly the dismal science.<p>How do you put a dollar cost on mass-extinction? It&#x27;s ludicrous to even try.

If money matters more than lives (even if it&#x27;s your own or a lot of people you might care enough), then he might be right.<p>If it doesn&#x27;t, then he is wrong. Never cross a river that in average is 4 feet deep, nor suppose that an increase of the global yearly average of temperature of 2 degrees excludes the possibility of 55-60 ºC on very populated cities on some particular day in a near future. That probably will kill a lot of people, and cause a lot of health troubles to a lot more. And to make it worse, it won&#x27;t be an isolated event, it will keep happening and getting worse, and not affecting just people.<p>If you see what he proposes as &quot;it will be less expensive to kill a lot of people&quot;, he might be technically right. And very wrong.

Basically he says Carbon is contributing to GHG and climate change but claims that managing a 1.5C is more expensive than “going green”.<p>That is it would be long term cheaper to adapt to climate change than to reverse it (with the proviso that we tax the externalities of carbon.)<p>It’s an interesting proposition and perhaps it does have economic merit. Of course many people will dismiss it out of hand because it questions our present assumptions.

“According to its last update, published in early 2017, the Obama EPA reported that the SCC in 2030, using the standard 3% discount rate, would be $50 per ton.”<p>Does anybody know the context in which 3% is considered the “standard” discount rate? The choice of a specific discount rate reflects&#x2F;implies a philosophical stance about the value of stuff in the future. I’m interested in how 3% is the value we’ve converged on.

William Nordhaus and his cost estimates are themselves controversial and by no means some kind of standard in the field of climate mitigation economics. For people who paid attention, this was brought up when he won his prize. [1]<p>I dare say the IPCC knows better than both Econlib and Nordhaus. There isn&#x27;t much of an analysis here. They ignore the most obvious huge cost: the risk of reaching the tipping-point after which global warming would be unstoppable. They ignore the positive externalities of climate action, which are plenty in themselves. They ignore the fact that it is not possible to not act now and then suddenly put on the brakes on warming when we reach whatever target they deem appropriate.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foreignpolicy.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-nobel-prize-for-climate-catastrophe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foreignpolicy.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-nobel-prize-for-cli...</a>

It sounds a lot less important that he&#x27;s a Nobel laureate when you realize he got the prize in economics and econlib is libertarian drivel.

Having won the Nobel Prize doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean someone holds reasonable views in fields outside their immediate speciality.<p>1993 chemistry prize winner Kary Mullis supported AIDS denialists and expressed an interest in astrology: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kary_Mullis#Personal_views" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kary_Mullis#Personal_views</a>