Nobelist totally wrong on climate prediction and economic impact

Well, I was very surprised with this one. I can understand, that the Nobel prize was given to someone, who first spent some time with connecting climate and economy. And this is not an easy topic. I can also understand, that connecting lots of information together to one clear economic equasion, which is in favor to keep current wheels running was desirable…

…but guys, I do not have top world class university… and still I know, that for every statistical or econometric (or even predictive) model you need to use common sense, to gather all the inputs which affects the model itself. If not, than you of course miss the important relations and the model cannot have any reasonable outputs. Who was sitting at the Nobel prize comittee at that time? No-one with common sense? Or they did not read the study as they do sometimes at Universities?

And here we are. Nordhaus got Nobel prize, when he modelled strong relation between GDP and temperatures almost ceteris paribus. That’s a very simplified model of our civilization, or climate in general.

If you still do not see the problem, I will try to explain through few points:

• climate is not only temperature itself
• there are defined “climate tipping points”. More generally, when a system is going above it’s bearable extreme, he won’t revert to current state. This will mix up with cards and you cannot basically model the new optimum of the climate. IPCC is trying to do that more than 20 years.
• Getting 1 (or more) degree of temperature globally doesn’t mean, this temperature will be spreaded equally, both in time and space.
• Extremes in the system will have negative impact on GPD – not only by natural disasters, but you can imagine, that for example displacement and migration of people will not have positive feedbacks on GDP.

I will try as simple example as possible. If you have cattle. What will few strong summers with 8*C above standard temperature days (could be caused even by 1*C global temp rise) and light winters without snow do with your pasture? How will you mitigate issues caused by it to save your cattle and living? What will be the impact on soil, fauna and flora? What will be the impact of neighbouring ecosystem next year? Do you think, it will raise the GDP, when food will be scarce, with more effort and more expensive?

Check Steve Keen critique on Nordhaus study.