Comment by SupremumLimit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SupremumLimit | Hacker News Reader

This is a guy who claimed that 3.5 degrees of global warming was "optimal". He was absolutely delusional and built his models on preposterous assumptions. He did a vast amount of damage to the world by providing false justifications for climate denial and inaction on climate change. The fossil fuel companies must have loved him.

"when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century. Writing in the Economic Journal, Stern set Nordhaus straight in the harshest terms: “We could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world,” he wrote. “It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.”"

It says a lot about economics that he received accolades.

https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-winning-economics-of...

https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-high-priest-of-ecomoderni...

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-linden-nobel-eco...

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/misguided-nordh...

For what it's worth, a loss of "between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP" would be catastrophic. Relative to a baseline of 0% GDP growth --- which would itself be terrible --- a worldwide loss of 8.5% to 12.5% of GDP would entail the deaths of millions, and probably hundreds of millions.

The US GDP shrank 29% from 1929 to 1933. International trade fell by 66% between 1929 and 1932. I don't recall hundreds of millions of people dying in the 1930s.

US mortality rates declined during the 1930s. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends...

World infant mortality rates generally declined during the 1930s. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/nfant-Mortality-Rates-18...

He won the Nobel prize for that climate change research…

It's not a Nobel price. It's honestly a disgrace to the Nobel price.

The entire reason Alfred Nobel even came up with the price is that he didn't want to be remembered as the merchant of death once he passed away.

He made his fortune using explosives, in other words, he made money off of killing people.

Now this guy (Nordhaus) is willingly stepping up in justifying mass extinction and then gets a "in memory of Nobel" prize, basically glorifying "the merchant of death" and thereby turning the entire Nobel price idea on its head.

Nordhaus's model is best described as an "Optimal extinction model". The type of model you would advocate because you're not going to survive until the consequences hit, so him dying today isn't some sad event, it's him shirking his responsibility to the future.

Nordhaus was not a climate denier by any stretch of the imagination. The man founded climate economics, and advocated for carbon taxes very early!

He is deserving of critique for being far too conservative in his approach, yes, but it's not like the biggest damagers of the environment are doing less because William Nordhaus told them to do less. Trump and populist right aren't ripping up the EPA, the Inflation Reduction Act, etc. because of Nordhaus. They ripped up the policies because they deny climate change entirely. Would adopting more aggressive measures in the 80s made things better? Possibly, but I think people over estimate the political will vs. the technological shifts needed to eliminate fossil fuels.

Only now is it obvious we are going to rapidly, exponentially, move to solar globally because the cost savings are undeniable, regardless of what deniers may want. And, contrary to your Berman link above, energy transitions are NOT a myth. They were not evenly distributed, but they were quietly, regionally happening (the UK, and California, for example). Now it's reached a tipping point, and going global.

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/global-solar-capacity...

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential...

Nordhaus's work is essentially pacifying neoclassical economics and telling it that business as usual is fine.

This might not be climate change denial but the effects are basically the same.

I'm not sure there is any point in hair splitting whether someone wants to or accidentially lets humanity die out.

In either case you should ignore his research.

The effects were not the same as climate change denial, and it's absurd to suggest Nordhaus wanted or even that his results would have let humanity die out.

The majority of damage is being done by climate denying citizens and their elected populist governments that are entirely dismantling climate policies and carbon taxation or alternative carbon pricing measures.

His research methods are the foundation of environmental economics, so he should not be ignored (and won't be, DICE remains one major lens used by governments). The disagreement is over the numbers and specific damage assumptions which have been revised by others in new DICE model variants.

Why did he believe what he claimed? Did he have any arguments to back it up?

This article goes over his methods and why they're ridiculous:

"The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate.

...

Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 per cent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” "

https://theecologist.org/2023/nov/01/when-idiot-savants-do-c...

If anything, he is the guy to be blamed that global climate change theory was taken seriously and not the hockey guy that was making up data.

Just give the condolences for the guy and maybe also fuck off from the Maori lands, that you are occupying - you seriously can't be so radical and not be self-aware of that fact...

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