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Comment by flooow | Hacker News Reader

It may be ignorant or even insane, but this sort of thinking is also taken seriously in certain places, and even highly rewarded. William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for a model which predicts that if the planet warms by 6C - an extinction level event!! - GDP will only be reduced by 8.5%. Why? Because most high-value production happens indoors, where we have aircon. [1]

[1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/nobel-prize-winning-econ...

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I didn't know we have large scale agriculture happening indoors. It's a relief knowing we won't lose our high value productivity due to starvation /s

Why did such a flawed research win him a Nobel Prize? It's not like the Nobel Committee is made up of conservative politicians.

At first I thought this comment was a joke, but I see you made the GP comment so maybe serious (or just a good troll?).

In any case, yes, the Nobel Prize committee for Economics is made up of eminent economists, who are indeed probably best thought of as small-c conservative small-p politicians, rather than academics in the tradtional sense.

It was a serious question, and thank you for your answer. I knew nothing about the composition of the people who award it. I see now that the same Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that awards the other (hard science) Nobel Prizes also award the Nobel Memorial Prize, and I'll take your word on the views of the composition of that specific committee.

The article you linked to clearly states in paragraph 1 that the paper in question was published after he won the Nobel Prize.

Yep, but the model I referred to (DICE) had been developed by him (and others) over many years - unsurprisingly, since it's what he won the prize for.

More thorough critique: https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The_app...

Quite likely his work over the decades is consistent and builds upon itself, but your initial declaration was rather misleading, he did not win a Nobel Prize for declaring that a 6C increase in temps will result in an 8.5% decline in GDP.

Anyway, they gave a Nobel to Al Gore who made some pretty wacky claims that have failed to materialize, so it's not like the Nobel Committee has a spotless track record.

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