Doomsday scenarios about climate change always pretend that we are as stupid as Begonias

This week: episode number so many of the climate alarmism soap. Already in 2049, the damage to the global economy from climate change will be six times as high as the costs of mitigation, i.e. making the world CO2 neutral. This has been calculated for you by three researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

In that institute, four hundred people work day in, day out to think about how the effects of climate change are even worse than we already thought. According to that institute, climate change was also the underlying cause of the corona pandemic.

The usual alarm sign

Climate alarmists eagerly accuse their opponents of hidden financial interests, but if, for example, you point to those four hundred well-paid jobs at such an institute whose name already indicates which direction the conclusions should go, then that of course says nothing at all about the independence of such researchers.

Nevertheless, the research appeared in Topblad Nature So we should talk about it anyway, starting with the usual red flag that such research produces:

What we see here is climate damage in 2049 as a percentage of per capita income. As usual, the tropics are again deeply in the red: in Brazil and the Sahara people lose 30 percent of their income, and in the largest countries in terms of population, India and China, it is 10 to 25 percent.

But what is also striking is that a significant part of the world benefits from climate change, or is hardly affected by it: Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and a large part of the US.

Nevertheless, when weighed over the entire world population, the damage, according to Potsdam, amounts to 19 percent of income, or around that time $38 trillion (38,000,000,000,000) per year.

Which is not noticeable, because it is glossed over by Potsdam in their article Nature, is that they use a very strange definition of damage. If you were to make a similar map of the actual growth in income per capita if we did nothing about climate change, the entire world map would turn dark blue, almost black. According to their model, per capita income in Brazil and the Sahara will increase by 60 percent between 2023 and 2049, income in India and China by 65 to 80 percent, while income in the blue areas will more than double. And that includes all climate damage!

No real damage, but a prognosis

This ‘damage’ due to the climate is not real, tangible damage, but a forecast of less economic growth, compared to the forecast for economic growth in a hypothetical world without climate change. In that ideal world, the economy will grow by 2.5 percent every year, so that the current global economy of $105 trillion will grow to $200 trillion by 2049. Unchecked climate change therefore reduces the growth of the global economy to 162 trillion dollars (200 minus 38).

It is of course too much to ask of Potsdam to show this clearly in their article, so that ordinary people also understand what that ‘damage’ represents. They do refer to an article that states this. In the image below from that article, they show various scenarios for the growth of the global economy. The blue line is the very moderate growth scenario (SSP2) that the Potsdam researchers use. There I drew with a clumsy dotted line the ‘damage’ calculated by Potsdam due to unbridled climate change.

So this is the existential climate disaster that is coming our way: a growth curve that rises slightly less steeply than in the ideal case.

Two fictions compared

And that’s if you believe their model, which is a house of cards of assumptions. Apart from all technical objections, this model suffers from the same handicap as all those models that produce doomsday scenarios about climate change: they pretend that people are as stupid as Begonias. This model also compares two fictions: an ideal world without climate change in which nothing changes, and a world with climate change, which people completely passively accept. In such models, people are just like plants, which you can calculate that with a few degrees increase in temperature or a certain percentage less precipitation, they will produce x percent less yield.

But if there is one thing that humans are good at, compared to other animal species, it is adaptation, adapting to new circumstances. When the weather changes, we adapt our agriculture; if precipitation patterns change, we build dikes and locks; if there are better opportunities somewhere, we move. If one thing no longer works at a location, we will do something else there. We have been doing this with great success for thousands of years, and adaptation to climate change will automatically and largely unnoticed become part of this. In fact, it always has been that way.

But economists cannot or hardly quantify this in their models, so they pretend it does not exist. And so such a model can never show that adaptation is cheaper than mitigation.

Science journalist Arnout Jaspers wrote the bestseller The Nitrogen Trap. His new book will be published this summer, about energy transition in the Netherlands. Information for media and bookstore: [email protected]

Wynia’s Weekcelebrates its fifth anniversary. Wynia’s Week is made possible by the voluntarily paid subscriptions of readers, viewers and listeners. Are you already participating?