Why aim for reducing climate change?

Well if you read the description below the graph you'll get a little insight into the nuances between the models.

SSP1 - the 2nd place amongst GDP metrics - lowers poverty, reduces inequality, and helps the environment as well as improving health and education.

SSP5 - the 1st place - just bull rushes economic growth, but does little to reduce equality, and doesn't help health or the environment.

The broader sense of social well-being is maximised by SSP1. SSP5 is a short-term economic growth trend. Something shortsighted and ultimately very bad.

It's natural that investing into cheaper, more harmful resources, could benefit us more in the short term. But doesn't it make sense to go for the more beneficial long-term developments that will come down in cost with investment anyways? The earlier the better?

It's tempting to shoot for fossil fuels still, but scratch the surface and the benefits of developing sustainable resources is better now in a host of ways besides immediate economic growth, and better economically in the long run too once fossil fuels become scarcer and enviromental disasters damage industry.

Just look at recent issues like global instability's effect on energy import, and how our infrastructure can be impacted by small issues (shipping routes collapsing). Climate issues like flooding and rising sea levels, would dramatically imapct shiopping. And mass immigration from those disasters would increase likelihoods of wars that affect global trade.

Limiting the chances for these things to happen, at the cost of immediate GDP growth, is better for everyone.

It's a prisoner's dilemma between nations and currently everyone is playing to win only for themselves - and so everyone is losing.

Many will point out that GDP isn't everything, and they're right, but you are asking the right questions. Consider that human development has always been about more energy expended per capita, and using that energy to shape our environment so that life gets better. A footpath that gets muddy in the rain becomes (with more energy) a Roman road paved with stone becomes (with yet more energy) a modern asphalt highway, each progressively letting people travel further with greater ease.

With that in mind, and considering that fossil fuels are for now still the cheapest and most reliable source of energy for those who need it the most -- that is, the global poor -- I think an immediate phase-out of fossil fuels without an equivalent alternative is a non-starter, climate change or not. There is a lot of investment into renewable energy sources so it's possible that we reach that point of equivalence soon, though.

In terms of climate change itself, the argument I find most persuasive to significantly reduce emissions is to prevent geopolitical instability arising from climate-related natural disasters, mainly crop failure and famine. I happen to think that there's more pessimism than warranted in that regard, but nonetheless it's a real risk.

"Improving human wealth" is hardly the point of anything at all. If you believe otherwise, I'm afraid you are horribly confused. You won't be alone, but you will be confused.

Are you trying to maximize "human wealth", "human life", or "quality of life"? You've brought at least three different priorities into it, and none of them are necessarily related to each other.

In any case, "climate change" will wreak havoc on humanity and everything else. We should aim to avoid that to the extent that we think wreaking havoc on humanity and everything else is bad. This will involve tradeoffs, some of which are certain to be unpleasant. Adapt-or-die is a fact of nature, so having to justify adapting is at least curious.

I remember a man on television many years ago who said he was in favor of "saving the planet", but who would pay for it? The implication was that if it cost too much money, he'd rather just let the planet die. That's a pretty wild idea, you know? Imagine a comet on a collision course with the planet, and we ask ourselves, you know, whether it's really worth spending all that money to prevent the annihilation of all life.

Keep in mind that both the SSP1 and SSP5 lines are optimistic predictions*, if everything goes according to its respective plan.

If we choose the fossil-fuel development aiming for SSP5, but we get SSP3 or SSP4 instead, then we will mess up the environment for little benefit. Perhaps we should aim for SSP1 because even if we fail then at least the environment will be in a good condition to be able to try again.

*In particular, SSP5 requires "a very high carbon price, and lots of carbon capture and storage". If we don't get that, we don't get the high GDP either.

"Or solely to preserve endangered species?"

We, are the endangered species in the long term. For me this is the best I can do for other people, besides taking care for my family and friends. How can I help children and their children be able to grow up in an environment that is friendly to them? With all our luxury living is so easy, but with me living my life, I would like to not have a negative impact to the life of others. And here are a lot of unknown unknowns. I do notice I tend to be happier when I try to make my life more simple.

If I try to look at it objectively its only natural our population will go down. But if we are able to steer this, I would like to try that.

I think your premise rests on the assumption that higher GDP => a better society. Is that necessarily true? One could have a high GDP with millions of slaves working in poverty for some rich upper class, for instance.

The IPCC projections Ara based on a faulty assumption.

On this talk "the appealing neoclassical economics of climate change by Steve Keen". [0]

The talk goes into detail how the IPCC projections were made and all the wrong assumptions done on it.

[0] https://youtu.be/5LvyxH3O7kE

Trying to correlate climate change with GDP per capita is rather like trying to connect the performance of a car with the color of the passenger seats.

Things like ecosystem services or quality of life are not part of the GDP number. It only counts how much money changes hands.

> why should we aim to reduce emissions at a significant detriment to human life?

Around 60% of the global population lives within 100km of the shore[0]. In the US, coastal counties are home to 40% of Americans.

Relocating all those people (not to mention industry and commerce) would be a significant detriment to human life. Damage to industry worldwide would be a lot more than a few percent of GDP.

And this is not even considering all the ecological damage, food shortages (crop failures due to rising temperatures), danger to people everywhere due to more intensive storms, heat, etc.

In short, this is probably because climate economic modeling has traditionally focused on estimating more knowable, quantifiable impacts, and acknowledging but not including potential (maybe even probable!) impacts that are too difficult to model based on current knowledge. Tail risk is a big area that has traditionally not been modeled well leading to a very likely underestimate to the social cost of carbon (SCC): https://www.volts.wtf/p/economists-have-quantified-the-econo...

Here’s a historical overview of the situation with some links to the latest research: https://impactlab.org/research-area/social-cost/

It’s not just tail risk, even things like geopolitical instability and crop failure were often not historically included… you can see why the headline statement seems to conflict with intuition, and it’s because of the narrow view taken on the impact of the fossil fuel scenario on GDP.

There is one more important element, and that is the distinction between economic activity (which GDP measures) and economic welfare. Natural disasters often don’t have much of an impact on GDP in part because the rebuilding activity counts in GDP. But it’s obvious to see why a future where we are spending an increasingly larger share of our effort to mitigate and rebuild losses is a much worse one. So GDP may not be the best measure here: https://www.economy.com/economicview/analysis/296804/How-Nat...

The moderate climate that we have/had that allowed for agriculture and the dawn of our entire civilization is an outlier on the geological timescale of this planet. We should be doing everything we can to preserve that climate.

Civilization is perpetually 7 days away from collapsing. Once the food chain collapses, in 7 days so does every modern amenity that you take for granted. GDP isn't the end goal, our survival is.

The biggest risk for climate change has always been food production and economic water availability. Just look at the western US that depends on the Colorado River for the risk involved.

We can live most anywhere on the planet, and that isn't going to change. Though relocating from higher risk areas to lower has a cost that will be inflicted on those who are in an area where the risk shifts. If it happens on a long enough timescale the effects won't be that great as we're generally rebuilding our infrastructure on regular intervals anyway.

I always wonder why we focus so much on prevention instead of mitigation the actual risk cases. Instead of curbing emissions, which seems to have no effect (see economic down turns with corresponding dips in emissions as evidence with no apparent results in CO2 levels).

Why don't we invest in better water distribution systems and food production resilience? Instead of making it hip to have a lower carbon footprint, why don't we change what being "green" means to, say gardening?

It got even more complicated when noting that GDP per capita is not equal everywhere. And there potentially are global maximum for local area (local as in not world wide, but a country or a region) to just ignore climate change risk altogether, since the current economic situation, either staying as is or trying to grow while avoiding climate change, is just too bad already.

I'm in Vietnam, and while the government fully acknowledges climate change, with projection and plan to lose xx% of our most populous city (currently 10+ million population) to sea rise, but fully go ahead with coal power generation for industry... so yeah. There is definitely some dysfunctional planning at play, but probably a lot of calculated risk too. I'm expecting China to have the same calculus.

I don't know if the experts do plan and account for those situations, but you definitely aren't gonna get a good layman discussion on a Western centric forum like this one. I'm barely comfortable to write this comment as is :-)

My understanding is that the impacts of warming will be uneven, with parts of e.g. India becoming unlivable. So we're looking at mass migration and/or warfare with continued warming. Are the GDP estimates factoring those into account?

I'd love it if this could be handled peacefully, and Canada just sells a big chunk of some northern province to the Indian government: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33483424 But history doesn't exactly leave me optimistic here.

The SSP5 Full-based model say: "This world places increasing faith in competitive markets, innovation and participatory societies to produce rapid technological progress". In short, this is believing in a return of the "30 glorious" period with the utopia than a magic technology will solve everything in time.

Then look for the example of Venice, with her sea level problem. Sure a very costly technology seem to have mitigated the high tides (for now). But in the same time, the "competitive market" of very big ferry-boats have replaced the high tides in the work of destroying the city.

For the global sea level, there will be regions who will gain a lot of money with it, like northern Canada and maybe Russia, because, it will be more easy to excavate minerals/petroleum/gaz/etc. and transport them with new and economics sea routes. This will bring a lot of GDP globally, but in the same time, plenty of poor and populous regions will disappear. The lost in GDP will be small because they will go from poor to still poor (or dead).

This... only if the Gulf-Stream did not change his route because of the climate change. This sort of very bad hypothesis is never accounted by this family of economic models.

PS: The subject here is climate change, but the mass extinction of species is far more a problem then climate change because it cannot be reverted... until a few millions years.

The SSP5 appears to be presupposing everything else just works out in a high-trust, globally-integrated economy. The basic problems expected to surface in this century are largely ravaging of coastal communities and at least a few places that can currently support human life no longer being able to, largely near the equator. As far as balance of global land mass versus human population, there should still be enough, but significant migration will need to occur, including across national boundaries.

I'm not all that confident, given the way strong nationalism, isolationism, and anti-immigrant sentiment seem to have made major comebacks in rich nations far from the equator, that this would really happen.

But the bulk of the more serious ecosystem collapse scenarios probably don't happen until the next century. You can certainly make the argument that more people, more money, and significant investment into basic research and geoengineering stands a better chance of addressing this than stomping on emissions to prevent it. Higher GDP is probably a prerequisite to this happening, but political will and strong, trusted governments are another. We can't just have that GDP going toward bigger houses, faster cars, smarter targeted advertising, and even better-funded attacks on public services, science, and expertise.

We have built an insane amount of infrastructure within 10 meters of sea level (cities, ports, nuclear power plants, homes) and any model that doesn’t take into account the destruction of that infrastructure is a broken model (it’s probably not incorporated because it’s so hard to believe).

If NYC floods (a la Sandy) a few times a year, you can sure as hell bet there will be negative GDP consequences.

I think this boils down to another far more simple question

How would you fix what for which reasons? As long as we pretend this to be mainly an ideological problem while ignoring the practical difficulties of not just solving stuff, but figuring out what to solve using which metric, we are unlikely to do anything sensible. Because every error and uncertainty in the conclusion to that question is extremely profitable to exploit.

I would be willing to go one step further, the more people dont talk about this, but are having trivialized arguments in which you know to be right pushing for vague calls to action, the less likely is it that we are doing anything sensible.

I am also confident, that if i were wrong on this, somebody could explain why. While there is a limit to complexity of possible solutions, ignoring the problem doesnt make it go away. It makes it worse.

edit: In case its not obvious, this flawed approach of framing something as an ideological argument while discouraging goal oriented approaches would also be how sabotage looks.

> improve human wealth

What does that mean? Why should that be a goal?

> why should we aim to reduce emissions at a significant detriment to human life?

What? How do you concluded that reducing emissions would cause "a significant detriment to human life?" Are you saying that climate change would not be a significant detriment to human life?

What are you getting at here? What are your assumptions?

They aren't wrong.

Fuel is machine food. The more machines we have doing work the more a single human can output. That means cheaper food and products. Which, in turn, means wealthier people. The history of petroleum use has been towards cleaner fuels. I see no reason not to stumble forward as we always have. Using petroleum is how wealthy nations became wealthy. We aren't going to stop rising nations from doing the same. If we did without a way for them to leapfrog oil, to produce energy, we are doing a ladder pull.

The more recent transition to natural gas for energy production is the single greatest reduction in emissions in the last 20 years. We are using natural gas from oil wells now. However, it can also be easily produced from organic waste. Closing the fuel loop would be a huge win.

Environmental regulations typically hurt GDP. But we as a society (in the US at least) have long ago figured out that the improved quality of life is worth the decrease in overall productivity in many cases.

If you generalize the analysis to GDP trumps all, most environmental protections would fail that test.

It's very clear that burning fossil fuels is the right move unless there's some catastrophic outcome associated with climate change. This is because economic progress compounds. A small GDP gain now will be huge in a century.

I doubt there will be a catastrophe associated with climate change. I could be wrong. Since we're not going to stop emitting carbon we'll find out.

Because the higher CO2 levels get, the dumber we all become. If you think there’s too many dumb people now, you’re going to be extra disappointed as time passes!

https://www.pranaair.com/blog/harmful-effects-of-carbon-diox...

Higher GDP just means more wealth concentrated in the hands of a very few, while the costs and consequences continue to be externalized to the poorest.

"GDP per capita" is effectively a lie, when the wealth is so unevenly distributed. In that light, it's hardly a metric to maximize.

>Why is this the case?

Seems very obvious. Fossil fuels are the best way to generate energy by far. In the end GDP and environmental pollution are the same thing or at the very least highly correlated.

>In light of this, why should we aim to reduce emissions at a significant detriment to human life? Is it because of unknown unknowns? Or solely to preserve endangered species?

It is because certain groups believe that climate change will induce an apocalyptic scenario ending most life on earth.

The "dirty secret" of the whole thing is that decarbonisation and deindustrialisation are the same thing. China is gambling that climate change is self correcting, which is the game theoretical optimum for any nation.

The IPCC report has sections, and the one done by economists is, mhhh. I would say: "burn it". However they'd probably say it would boost GDP...

> Or solely to preserve endangered species?

You are aware, that we are on of those endangered species' when we don't change anything about climate change?

Bingo.

I think the focus should be on effective ways to help poor contries, reduce policical risks, improve market flow, make everyone richer, without being stupid about it.

Cut out coal plants as soon as we can, research into geoengineering, renewable, etc.

On our current path of technological improvement CO2 will be a non issue in a decade or two.

IPCC is politicized with a liberal/capitalist realist perspective

Scratch the surface a little bit and the marxist envy comes out quite easily.

From "Green new deal" type stuff, where technical solutions don't count because rich people would still be richer than poor people or something, to the new "degrowth" strategy which barefacedly tells us we need to be worse off, be fewer, or both.

Why? Because these activists are rich, bored, and useless. And playing polo and buying fast cars is not an acceptable use of their time anymore, no, now they compete between themselves to see who saves the world the hardest.

Don't look for any logical explanation, go to the eschatological ones and you'll have better luck.

The earth doesn’t care if it’s warmer or colder, polluted, full of CO2, etc. The earth is a planet. If humans die out it will be like we were never here geologically speaking.

The reason to be a good environmental steward is to make the earth habitable for ourselves. This is why people who claim “I don’t want kids because of global warming” are so incredibly stupid - the earth does not care a smidgen about them, it’s a rock. If they really cared about the environment they would have as many kids as they could in hopes of raising a great scientist to help the environment!

Another thing to remember is that the earth has been much warmer and much cooler during the time of humanity. We had a little ice age throughout the Middle Ages. While we are most certainly making the earth warmer with technology, this isn’t a death blow to us. We as a species will adapt.

Even if humans had zero output on the environment we would still have to deal with a changing climate - the earth cycles between colder and hotter naturally over time. So becoming better able to heat or cool the earth technologically will be a very good technique for our species.

There’s a book called “Unsettled” that does a good job of explaining the many problems with the climate change accepted narrative in scientific consensus. You are just scratching the surface.

Honestly, it's pathetic that this is even a matter of discussion amongst a self-proclaimed intelligent community (or is it wisdom?). I won't honor this thread with my counterpoints to the GDP argument since others have covered this to some extent. I live in the city, but even I understand the value of natural preservation.

We humans must become better shepherds of the earth we inhabit. It's not just out of the goodness of our hearts, but due to a moral obligation that binds us all.

The best scenario possible for humans alive right now is to use fossil fuels (including coal) to reduce poverty and generally improve quality of life but having the fumes concentrated in areas where there is no population and have the electricity transported to major centers of population via high voltage lines.

Nothing is as cheap and vastly availible, doesn't require an overhaul of the grid, no need to develop new tech, it's all understood down to the last detail.

Everything else is just gaslighting, hypocrisy and selfishness that has people in rich areas of the world and especially the very rich areas within very rich countries (think California, New York, Oslo, Stokholm) care more about their children and their children's children than people who are alive right now.

The worse are those who don't have children and don't plan to have children but they still live in those rich areas and use climate to virtue signal. In one word Leonardo Di Caprio.

Amazing actor, great producer and fundraiser, delicious taste as far as his women but completely unaware of the trade-offs necessary to do what he wants.

The moment actors and people from the show-biz stopped supporting Africa and turned to climate you understand the deep divide between Hollywood, NYC and the priorities of the rest of the country, even with something as trivial as empathy. The rest of the country has empathy for humans whereas NYC and LA graduated to empathy towards animals and inanimate object such as climate.