Calculating the True Cost Of Global Climate Change

Other experts see the hit to GDP as much greater. “We did a survey of top economists in the country, asking what they think about the costs and benefits of climate legislation,” says Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “They said that climate change is a clear threat to America and the global economy.” Adds Berkeley’s Hanemann: “I don’t want to be Dr. Gloom, but our complacency in the U.S. is wrong.”
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Harvard economist Martin Weitzman even suggests that the economic costs of a catastrophic event, however unlikely it might be, would be so enormous that it would overwhelm the whole analysis. “Perhaps in the end the climate-change economist can help most by not presenting a cost-benefit estimate for what is inherently a fat-tailed situation with potentially unlimited downside exposure,” he writes.

Calculating the True Cost Of Global Climate Change
by john carey


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The direct economic damages from acidification are negligible. “We know the actual economic impacts are almost sure to be small because they involve fisheries, which are already pretty small, and they involve only ocean fisheries that are sensitive to carbon,” Nordhaus says.

Well now an economist thinks he's an oceanographer. This is common. People do not realize how much our very lives depend on a healthy ecosystem.

Acid Test: The Science of Ocean Acidification from Tristan Bayer on Vimeo.