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If you really don't believe climate change will have any impact, you should take a look at the actions of insurance companies. Their survival depends on them properly pricing in climate risk, and there's a reason why they've largely abandoned florida.
parent: > [...] they only predict that economic growth will be less because of climate change [...]
I would rather follow "number of excess death directly or indirectly linked to climate change." I don't know if that can be calculated somewhere.
Why? Isn't economic activity a very good proxy for normal human life, good living standards, and the capacity to adapt to any conceivable challenges? Limited economic impact from climate change is arguably the most important and positive climate related news you could ever hope to see.
> I would rather follow "number of excess death directly or indirectly linked to climate change." I don't know if that can be calculated somewhere.
Excess deaths due to climate change, or perhaps a ratio of excess deaths relative to the total population, might be a great metric to consider. But how could one even begin to calculate this in a way that wasn't agenda driven? One could spin pretty much anything as directly or indirectly linked to climate change. Maybe you won't, but others will.
If there's bad political policies that screws over the global economy (possibly caused by the attempt to react to climate change itself) and masses starve to death the "experts" can spin it as "Economic pressures from climate change killed these people."
If there's government incompetence that poisons some water supply and kills a bunch of people the "experts" can spin it as "Pressures from a changing climate contributed to a reduction in the fresh water supply that contributed to mass deaths."
If there's some civil war that kills a bunch of people the "experts" can spin it as "Civil strife brought about partially from the social pressures caused by economic inequality due to a lack of climate justice caused this."
If there's any natural disaster that kills a lot of people the "experts" can spin it as "Continued impacts from climate change contributed to the massive death toll."
Voila, climate change directly or indirectly killed 2 billion people over some large time period, depending on how you count it.
Whether you agree with it or not, using that metric is going to feel a lot like Covid where both sides see the "other side's" statistical interpretation of reality as completely untrustworthy.
It's not a bad proxy, but it surely is not as good as actual excess death as proxy for "normal human life, good living standards and the capacity to adapt". Economic activity is means to those ends; excess death is a measurement of how far we can attain them.
Excess deaths, in and of themselves, only tell you that more people than average died. Excess deaths, in and of themselves, don't tell you why they died.
While a total number of human deaths is objective and can be counted with nearly perfect confidence, human deaths from a specific cause can be extraordinarily subjective. I gave some examples in the post you're replying to, but anybody with an agenda can link virtually anything to climate change if they really want to. Therefore, this metric isn't going to be persuasive to a large amount of people.
If I was an analyst in the early 1940s analyzing why there was an excess of human deaths and wrongly attributed it to an increase in bear attacks, wouldn't that be really dumb?
If you're trying to solve a specific problem, isn't getting the cause of death wrong a really big deal?
Misattributing it to bears when it was really lead in gasoline or plastics in the air or whatever really caused it just delays your ability to help fix it, but that's a different question.
I was thinking of WWII in my 1940s example, which I thought might have been obvious, but that's besides the point. (Bear attacks are a silly example to illustrate the principle involved)
If you're misattributing excess societal deaths to a wrong cause such as bears when the cause is anything else, there's a much bigger cost than just delaying your ability to understand and fix a real problem.
1) While you have the real cause of deaths wrong, people are dying of something else that is perhaps preventable. There's a real opportunity cost.
2) Say you work up a real social panic about something incorrect (such as bear attacks) and start reconfiguring society to focus solely on preventing bear attacks. Any policies here can cause dramatic harm to the economy. Not only does a bad economy directly and indirectly kill lots of people, but it weakens your ability to fix other more important problems. Your well-intentioned, but misguided attempt to save people from bears can kill far more people than it saves.
3) How would you know if your attempt to prevent bear attacks causes more harm than it prevents? All of a sudden, there's going to be a big industry of people making lots of cash in providing bear attack prevention methods. They're going to virulently attack anybody who starts voicing any opinions that are contrary to the general proclamation that bear attacks are the existential threat to society. Any opposition to the bear-attack-prevention-industrial-complex is going to be subject to intense derision and you're never going to be able to properly direct social energy to other, perhaps bigger problems, under this condition.
However, I would still maintain that it is useful (necessary?) to differentiate between measurement and diagnosis.
Excess deaths will remain an excellent (proxy) measurement for the extent to which we are satisfying (at least) the 3 goals you mentioned.
Excess deaths (by themselves) are not useful for diagnosing the causes of their off-normal value.
That will be a negative number.
Because "climate change" i.e. global warming will see increased temperatures and increased crop yields.
It seems obvious that there's a tension between economic activity (aka living in a somewhat developed country) and resource usage.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/a-closer-examin...