Friday, December 26, 2008

The Economics Of Climate Change

Once upon a time, debates about climate policy were primarily about the science. An inordinate amount of attention was focused on the handful of “climate skeptics” who challenged the scientific understanding of climate change. The influence of the skeptics, however, is rapidly fading; few people were swayed by their arguments, and doubt about the major results of climate science is no longer important in shaping public policy.

As the climate science debate is reaching closure, the climate economics debate is heating up.

Still lazy and overstuffed with meat. Until such time as I am feeling more energetic, Frank Ackerman provides a nice overview of the state of the economic debate re climate change and makes a case for acting immediately. Nice discussion of the importance of "discount rates". You'll laugh! You'll cry!

6 comments:

Steve V said...

That first paragraph must come as quite a shock to all the knuckle draggers trolling the blogs, who said 2008 would be the year that climate change would be shown a fraud.

Anonymous said...

Do you members of the Church of Climate Scientology celebrate Christmas ?

http://tinyurl.com/88wwlr

Steve V said...

Oh Fred, hope you got a clue for Christmas.

Anonymous said...

Everybody "knows" the economic cost of going green. Too bad they're wrong. There's an actual chance here if only people could take it. Keep spreading the word. It's the c-word we need to know.

Unknown said...

Does this mean that this time we are really, really (we promise) going to do something concrete about AGW?

Ray said...

By advocating for an end to climate change, do you propose that we work to eliminate climate change? If I'm not mistaken, it's been changing since about 4.5EE9 BC.

You guys seem to look at charts through a microscope. If you'd pan out you'd see how miniscule the "Catastrophic" recent changes are.

Can you explain the last major ice age, or, better still, the mini ice age that ended about the time of the US civil war?