I don't need evidence that the planet is warming, I need a cost/benefit analysis of what meaningful impact (if any) such "strong actions" could possibly have on this trend.
During the last century, CO2 emissions have been steadily rising year-over-year, in line with population growth across the globe. Given that this trend is now stalling naturally, the warming trend should follow suit. This leads me to the question: How bad is the "do literally nothing" scenario really?
Your analysis of the 2x2 possibility space is simplistic and wrong. I'll attempt to quickly illustrate this.
We assume the desired goal of mitigating global warming is to save the lives of poor of those in poor countries. An argument can be made that the relatively rich will face changes, but will be able to adapt.
So the do nothing and no global warming scenario, while on its surface may not seem to have any negative effects, its effects in fact are quite devastating. The money and attention that we are focusing on global warming could be used to address problems that are actually killing people today. Some simple examples, are vaccination, education, disease research, building infrastructure etc.
So the question is best phrased as giving what we know now, what can we do to mitigate risk and save the most people. Some solutions are:
0. Family Planning & Birth Control
1. Nuclear power
2. Research into drought resistant crops and crops that can grow in warmer environments.
3. Improved monitoring of the earth
4. Research into new energy technologies, so that they can be deployed when they are mature enough.
So I'm not advocating any action over any other, I'm merely pointing out that your analysis is heavily flawed.
Actually it's even easier to do nothing if you throw up your hands and say it won't work anyway.
The earth will warm more than 2°C from "baseline" no matter what. Now the 1 trillion ton additional CO2 is an interesting benchmark, but I would guess staying under it has very little to do with energy consumption, and almost everything to do with advances in carbon-neutral and carbon-negative power generation technologies to be invented and scaled over the next century.
But not generating the power in the first place just isn't a choice. If it's a hard-line ultimatum I think a billion people could die trying to fight/enforce it.
The takeaway from OP is that climate changes. It changes quite dramatically. And it changes with or without humans in the mix. Maybe we need to spend that $100 trillion getting more adaptable to changing climate rather than entertaining some fantasy that we can control Mother Nature within some sliver of a temperature range relative to her broad historical performance.
That's a very vague prediction. It might not be worth doing anything at all, other than planning where to move cities to gradually as the need requires. If we pull out all the stops to prevent it now, we might have wasted our resources - spending more than we saved by preventing it. Almost every building that exists today was build in the past 100 years. We can surely keep up some of that work in the next 100 years.
Are there any more concrete numbers about how much destruction is expected from global warming? It's not infinite and it must be less than some amount of money.
Compared to the ultra-stupid "let's pump up global CO2 to levels not seen in 4 million years; we swear nothing bad will happen," doing nothing might be a good change of pace for global civilization.
It depends entirely on (1) whether you think those "aggressive and immediate measures to combat global warming" will work; and (2) the economic cost of those measures relative to climate change costs.
That sounds like a lot, except OECD projects that by 2060 world GDP will be $267 trillion annually: https://data.oecd.org/gdp/gdp-long-term-forecast.htm. Estimates of world GDP in 2100 are in the $250-$500 trillion range annually.
That means that adopting policies that cause us to hit the lower end of that range instead of the upper end of that range could cost us more than the total cost of a 3.7C increase in just a few years. And if those government policies don't work then you will have paid that cost, and you'll have to deal with the cost of climate change on top of it.
Now, of course lots of things could happen. Climate change could be an extinction-level problem. (According to the IPCC, there is "virtually no chance" of anthropogenic causes resulting in a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect.) Or we could figure out workable CCS in 2050 and average climate change entirely. (That's also not super likely.)
Ultimately, the rational course depends on what you think of government action in this area. If you think it'll cost a lot but end up ineffective (like say the "War on Poverty") then it's completely rational to vote against it. If you think it'll work without hurting economic growth significantly, then it's rational to vote for it.
That's a delusional viewpoint. "Doing nothing" is absolutely on the table. In fact, it is the most likely outcome for a very long time to come. Pretty soon, you will hear about geoengineering solutions. Whether you like it or not, it will be seen as the most realistic solution on the table, if not the only one.
Probably a rather small impact. On the other hand, replacing all energy consumption but transportation with carbon free alternatives isn't enough either.
Global warming doesn't have a simple solution. We need to attack a large number of problems simultaneously if we want a chance to prevent catastrophe.
You need viable solutions and cost/benefit analysis for how much warming is too much warming.
There is little to no consensus on all of that. There isn't a consensus on how sensitive the climate is to carbon and to what feedback loops exist. Even the IPCC ranges are fairly broad.
Then we don't know how much the warming will affect the actual climate and what the effects will be. What does earth at +5 degrees C even look like?
What if in 20 years solar, wind and battery tech is so cheap that natural gas and coal plants shut down. Everyone goes to electric cars, and carbon output plummets?
Indeed it makes almost no difference to act alone. Even if somewhere like the USA completely cut all CO2 emissions today, with liberal estimates by 2100 it would reduce the temperature by less than 0.15°C, which is about 1 standard deviation of measurable temp.
agreed, but that's the inevitable conclusion of any inquiry into solving climate change. Should we therefore do nothing? Probably not. But again, i won't elaborate.
Real action? What specific climate fixing action would you recommend people take? I suspect eliminating electricity and transportation would have the greatest impact, although that is not realistic.
I mean, you have to ask yourself what you actually believe about the climate.
Do you think that climate change is somewhere between "unbounded costs ranging in the hundreds of trillions of dollars over the course of 2050-2150," and "the death of humanity and/or all multicellular life on Earth"?
Because if so, the side effects of geoengineering probably aren't that bad, and even if they are, they're apparently only as bad as what you think the costs of doing nothing are.
On the other hand, do you think that climate change is either non-existent or some kind of relatively mild thing that will cause $100 Trillion dollars or less over the course of a century? Then probably geoengineering is not for you -- but that also means that you're somewhere outside the orthodoxy on climate change.
If you believe that climate change is a real big problem (ie, hundreds of trillions of dollars or much more in damages over a century timeline) AND that it is stoppable by being really persistent in asking people to use solar and wind power, then I don't think that you're being very realistic.
It seems pretty fool-hardy to me to think that we shouldn't act on climate change on the chance that we can simply spend a few dozen trillion a few decades down the road to try to mop up the problem.
Perhaps we should find a report that also analyzes how much human suffering and ecological damage would occur with a 3 degree C increase versus a 1.5 increase?
One point that isn't stressed enough is how much humanity depends on rich ecosystems for so much of our technology, medicine, and science. Life would be much harder for us on an ecologically devastated Earth.
We have been engaged in a massive geoengineering experiment over the last century which involves putting out massive amounts of CO2. Even after decades of research the impacts of it are disputed and there is no will to make serious adjustments. I doubt we could set up a cooling effort in a way on the necessary scale where we understand the consequences and are willing to pay for it.
Whether that is true depends on your sense of scale. After we move to zero emissions, it will take only a couple of decades before CO2 will start to drop again, as the biosphere starts absorbing the greenhouse gases.
There's some latency in temperature, much more in sealevel rise, but generally it isn't as bad as frequently depicted. I only learned this recently, I used to think we are unavoidably messed up for centuries, but that's really not the case. For my son I believe there's a scenario it will get better, not worse, in his lifetime. Though it's not a scenario I think is likely to happen.
I'm not optimistic about our societies willingness and ability to do so, but all action does matter and we definitely have the possibility. Ironically, drastic and massive climate action is also the cheapest thing to do.
The best-case scenario is that over the next 30 years we ramp down our greenhouse emissions to zero, and the planet warms up by ~2 degrees Celsius and stays there.
We're not currently on track for this, but it's still achievable (or close to it).
The worst-case scenario is that we do nothing at all to solve the problem, and the planet warms up by 10+ degrees over the next century.
And the temperature would continue to increase until we literally run out of fossil fuels to burn.
There's a big difference between 2 and 10 degrees warming.
I think modern civilization could survive the former, not so sure about the latter.
During the last century, CO2 emissions have been steadily rising year-over-year, in line with population growth across the globe. Given that this trend is now stalling naturally, the warming trend should follow suit. This leads me to the question: How bad is the "do literally nothing" scenario really?
reply