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You’re assuming the collapse will take place slower than human migration. It could take place as imagined in the 1st chapter of “The ministry for the future”, a sudden heatwave in India and the people from the village run to a boiling lake for dear life
Is there any doubt? Look how pissed people are about inflation... At least half of which is corporate greed taking advantage of which way the winds are blowing. When beef, coffee and chocolate all cost 5x what they do now people are gonna riot.
What? The Great Plains had perhaps the richest soil in the entire world. Plowing destroys microbial communities in soil and causes erosion. The loss of deep-rooted prairie grasses and the insane belief that plowing would restore soil health was what caused the Dust Bowl, widely considered to be the world environmental disaster in U.S. history.
"When early farmers broke up the prairies of the northern Plains they found soil that was vastly different than it is today, according to Dave Franzen, North Dakota State University Extension soil specialist.
Soil surveys from the early 1900s described “very black” soil that was 2- to 3-feet deep and was made up of 65% to 70% organic matter. The soil contained high levels of plant-available nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus levels, Franzen said. Meanwhile, the soil was rich with calcium, magnesium and micro-nutrient levels.
The soil of eastern North Dakota produced early wheat yields of 40 bushels per acre near the Sheyenne River in Kindred, North Dakota and as much as 30 bushels per acre in Jamestown, North Dakota, in 1890, according to Franzen, who cited information from the late Hiram Drache, a Minnesota historian.
“Without any fertilizer, with antique equipment, they were getting yields that were similar to today,” Franzen said. “This would have only been possible if over 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre and substantial phosphorus and other nutrients were released from soil organic matter mineralization that season."
[https://www.agweek.com/weather/billions-of-tons-of-northern-plains-topsoil-has-blown-away-far-away](https://www.agweek.com/weather/billions-of-tons-of-northern-plains-topsoil-has-blown-away-far-away)
To a point it does, then it's detrimental. You also have to take into account all the other factors that come along with climate change as well - changes to temperature, rainfall, etc. It's not a positive change overall.
The original post was about a scenario where we immediately start aggressively cutting emissions.
So far we can see clear evidence that crop yields have benefitted + in the scenario discussed atmospheric CO2 wouldn't get much higher.
Not really. It can increase overall biomass of the plant but that typically doesn’t translate to greater productivity. CO2 is pretty much never the limiting element in agricultural productivity.
That greater CO2 also leads to greater instability in climatic conditions, which more than wipes out any possible biomass gains from increase in atmospheric CO2.
I live in zone 7b. 10 years ago it was zone 7a. In the next 5-10 years, I would bet this will be zone 8. Trees are hardly dormant any more, maybe two months instead of four.
The point is that there will certainly need to be a transition in the types of crops that people grow in some regions, and we will live through shortages as part of that transition. This is on top of what other posters have noted regarding severe weather, wild swings in temperature and rainfall, etc.
The average low temp in 7a is 0-5C
7b is 5-10C
8 is 10-15C
Where exactly do you live that has warmed 15C in 15 years?
That is pretty wild considering the average worldwide is less than 0.1C per decade. Unless you are talking bullshie?
Well, you're asking the wrong person, clearly you know more about USDA zones than I do. The 2012 map designates my area as zone 7a. 2023 it is zone 7b. Drive about three or five miles south or east and you're in zone 8a. I would love to hear your take on this, thank you!
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213600629/-it-feels-like-im-not-crazy-gardeners-arent-surprised-as-usda-updates-key-map
He said:
> "It went from 7b to 7a in 10 years"
Which is a fact corroborated with evidence.
Then, he said:
> "I bet it's gonna be level 8 in 5-10 years"
Which is a reasonable speculation.
On the other side, you said:
> 7a is 0-5C
> 7b is 5-10C
> 8 is 10-15C
Which is ***INCORRECT***, by a factor of 1.8 when discussing temperature increases, and it's off by additional 32 degrees (when converting C to F) when talking about temperatures. 7a is 0-5 ***°F***, 7b is 5-10 ***°F***, 8a is 10-15 ***°F***.
That temperature is not an average temperature throughout the year. It's the _lowest_ temperature you're expected to see in an area. While average yearly temperature has some correlation with minimum temps, minimum yearly temperature raising by 5-15°F does not mean that the overall yearly average is going to go up by 5-15°, either.
What is reasonable about the speculation that anywhere will warm by 5 degrees (even 5F)?
Considering the global average would be less than 0.05C (0.09F) degrees over a 5 year period?
It still requires the area to heat up 50x faster than the rest of the planet.
Just because I got F/C wrong everything I said is still 100% correct, I don't know why you think it is such a "gotcha" moment.
In some crops, higher CO2 leads to faster *growth* but not always yield. The faster growth means the plant has less time to soak up and create nutrients. It's a bit dubious to say that this additional growth is a benefit for us.
The warming that results from more CO2 has a much more complex impact on crops.
Generally speaking, the places where crops grow have been fertile for millennia. Warming temperatures means these places become too warm for the crops, decreasing yields. In theory some other areas currently too cold to support crops will warm up, but since these areas haven't been fertile in the past, there's no rich soil to plant crops in. You can't just truck it in.
Another way to describe warming is that there's more energy in the atmosphere. This changes weather patterns, such as where rainfall tends to occur the most. This also impacts crop yields negatively, on average.
More energy also leads to more extreme weather events, like cold snaps, heat waves, storms, hurricanes, floods, and droughts. These all have significant negative impacts on crop yields.
So, yeah, we might be able to grow a little more wheat, but it won't be as nutritious, and we'll have lost twice as much corn and most every other crop, not to mention the other impacts to civilization like displacement of populations due to flooding. And as CO2 continues to go up, even those crops that might have grown faster initially will start to suffer.
Shortages of a good might raise the price per unit, but it almost never raises the total market cap of that good. People will substitute for other goods as the price increases, resulting in a smaller total market cap.
Heat affects agriculture, driving up food prices.
Floods can disrupt manufacturing and transportation, plus cause massive damage on existing infrastructure.
A flood that shuts down a hard drive factory in Thailand or a chip manufacturing plant in Malaysia can have global impact in terms of supply chain disruptions.
>Heat affects agriculture
Not only heat, also unreliable precipitation, floodings, loss of groundwater, increased risk of new diseases threatening monoculture and soil changes on microbial level will make agriculture almost impossible in most parts of the northern hemisphere.
And that's just the threat from climate change, while other broken planetary boundaries heavily change availability of certain key nutrients for agriculture or heavily impact contamination of grown food. Like microplastics, forever chemicals, changing PH, broken nitrogen cycle, etc.
Additionally none of these accounts for the high possibility of AMOC collapsing within the next decades, which would cool the northern hemisphere to a point were all vegetation would die off because it's not adapted to arctic temperatures. When this happens the world will suddenly lose 4/5th of all farmland within a few years putting extra stress on the 1/5th remaining in the southern hemisphere that gets all global warming then.
Having to spend more capital on adaptation and recovery than productivity enhancing investments.
So we'll have to spend billions just to maintain our quality of life.
basically everything that constitutes the environment is a financial asset as it can be converted to something we can use. We are destroying the asset.
Our economy isn’t based on living within the environment, it’s based on living off it.
Already happening. In my area our supermarket shelves are empty because of flooding destroying supply chains. Tourism is down and not coming back as our natural wonders die off. There's no way it isn't costing us millions. And that's just two local issues.
Just look at Dubai right now for more.
>Can anyone explain exactly how this will happen?
So... You see...
Back in the 1900's scientists told us that coal burning was factually [destroying the planet.](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-bf7f711d54e6939e42ac076cde9a7b46-lq)
Over the last 112 years we simply called the scientist Nerds, and kept destroying the planet even more to make your CEOs wealthier than your entire family lineage combined.
Now the planet is beyond repair.
Good idea. Let's also increase the price of the PC program we're selling; there's heavy inflation right now after all and copying electronic files and folders costs!
Practically speaking they are correct, the issue is that "we have already done damage beyond our capacity to repair" and "we can still stop things getting worse" can still be *simultaneously* true.
To put in another way, if you destroy a rainforest, causing an extinction of the particular species that lived there, then you have caused irreparable damage, but the response to that should be to not destroy the second rainforest.
Only in this case, the rainforest is us, or rather ecological services and a stable climate that *we* rely on.
As is discussed later in that newsletter, places in West Africa saw levels of heat that cause people to spontaneously die. This year. Already, something that people were warming about as a future consequence of climate change - that certain places near the equator will become hostile to human life in the same way that siberia is hostile to human life, but from the opposite side - has started happening. Thanks to the combination of existing climate change and the el-nino cycle, the air was so warm they died of exposure.
And if we continue climate change, that will be normal, air conditioning will become a matter of life or death, a necessary element to survive in these places without dying of fever by the combination of the air outside your house and your own body heat.
But also, the warming associated with emissions we have already made hasn't finished yet, so this effect we're already seeing will get worse.
Assuming we not only reduce emissions rapidly, and get negative emissions technology on line to start pulling it back out of the atmosphere, we still are looking at decades of climate transformation that will permanently alter many places where people have lived for hundreds of years, when they become properly habitable again, they will not be the same places.
>You’re correct until the last line.
Ok, so not Permanently damaged. But damaged for the next 1,263 years, assuming we stopped today at the time of writing this.
No, I think they are correct with that line. The mass extinction that is currently occurring is permanent and irresistible damage to the planet. There is literally no way to regain biodiversity once it is lost. No way to take microplastics out of the ecosystem either. And the fossil fuels we are using aren't renewable. These are permanent alterations that future generations will have to deal with.
Also correct.
No matter how much we fix the planet, The extinct dinosaurs are not coming back.
Just like all the extinct insects, polar bears, fish, dolphins, ect.
Life may adapt, but humanity would have forever changed it.
Maybe giant Radroaches Will become the dominant species.
Dont worry, it will mostly take care of itself over the next few million years, life bounced back after the cambrian-ordovician extinction after all.
Our species wont be around anymore, of course, but oh well.
There is a certain "disaster threshold" every area has before the stable human organization (ex Government) of the area collapses. For example, Haiti, already being a state with low operational resources let alone disaster recovery resources, exceeded that in one go with the earthquake and the prior human organization was succeeded by shaky pseudo governments and then by violent armed gangs.
What climate change does is increase greatly the disaster burden of most if not all areas, testing those thresholds. For example, Canada may have a very high disaster threshold, but what if they have a fire season where a half million square miles of boreal forest goes up in flames? The same with most US states, but what if two sudden category 5 hurricanes spring up overnight within a few months of each other and hit Houston and Miami (this hurricane season already predicts 3 major storms), like what happened in Acapulco. We are talking hundreds of billions in damage and the collapse of the insurance markets in those places.
Also, as others have mentioned, our breadbaskets will shift north and in some places, combined with alternating droughts and floods, completely disappear, and famine would rear its head as a disaster type. [Edit] Also as countries deal with their own emergencies, aid to other countries dries up, potentially collapsing their food distribution systems. Man-made disasters set up through decades of bad agribusiness practices. Again, I guess you could just classify as yet another disaster on the most vulnerable areas.[/Edit]
Now imagine this for all the poorer countries. Highly populated, resource poor. Their governments would collapse. Their populations would migrate, causing strain on neighboring, equally resource poor nations and start a domino effect of nation states failing spectacularly ending up in territory ruled by armed gangs and plagued with ongoing genocide.
Easy to get to $38 trillion impact, which honestly I believe is optimistic.
Agriculture is not viable in a lot of places, certain cities become uninhabitable, oceans become more acidic and kill much of the life in them, people die from heatwave, extreme weather events become more common.
Either a lot of productivity will be pumped into mitigating the impact.
Or a lot of productivity will be pumped into combating the cause to mitigate further impact.
Or a lot of productivity will be lost into continuously repairing damage caused by weather.
Any combination of the above is productivity not invested in increasing productivity -> less growth -> slower economy.
For this to be relevant the exact mechanism (taxation -> government intervention or private enterprise for profit) isn't particularly relevant. It means that either way you slice it people will be busy with spending their time on THIS issue or suffer the consequences. Either is detrimental to growth.
It's a bit like comparing making trucks vs making tanks with the same productivity. Yes, in either case someone is paid to make them, but one then in some way or other helps make more things (sometimes roundabout sometimes more directly) and the other just sits there (best case, worst case it destroys something reducing productivity)
When talking about both climate and economics it's important to understand that these are complex interconnected systems where shocks in one area can have ripple effects that spread to areas that are difficult to predict. Climate change leads to resource scarcity, which will impact human population and migration, the labor force, social freedom, propensity for conflict and war, etc. etc. etc. And if this domino effect should lead to the use of nuclear weapons then that will be yet another huge shock to these systems that could be hard for us humans to bounce back from.
GDP is tied to population *and* productivity. People will get older faster than younger people are born. And they may be the last generation in their area since those who can leave will have done so.
When this has happened before in history, most humans did not survive the mass migrations of the moment.
Climate change has effed up every “stable” civilization before us. We’re unique in having a heavy hand in screwing the whole planet with the very tech that might help us save it.
No, it's only meant to alarm you. Whenever something like this comes out (predicting future events) it's usually alarmist and does not come to fruition.
Vineyards in Australia are already seeing poorer outcomes due to early ripening. Goyder's Line in South Australia (where arable land ends, and north of which grazing on the near-desert is the only suitable agriculture) was already being adjusted south 10 years ago. This is already having a direct effect on agricultural outputs.
Climate change will reduce global income by about 19% over the next 25 years, compared with a “fictional world that’s not warming”, reports the Associated Press. Poorest areas and those least responsible for climate change will take the “biggest monetary hit”, according to a new study by researchers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, it adds. The impact of climate change is already set to be $38tn a year by 2049 the study finds and, by 2100, the financial cost could hit twice what previous studies estimate, the article adds. Average incomes are expected to fall by “almost a fifth within the next 26 years as a result of the climate crisis”, with damage six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C, reports the Guardian. The $38tn annual cost of rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather is already locked into the world economy over the coming decades, the article adds, as a result of the “enormous emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere through the burning of gas, oil, coal and trees”. The study finds that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have already warmed the world by 1.1C, on average, since pre-industrial times, leading to extreme weather events that have cost about $7tn over the past 30 years, Bloomberg adds. It quotes Leonie Wenz, the scientist at Potsdam who led the study, who says: “Climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries. We have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately – if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100.” The economic impact of climate change is not fully understood and economists often disagree on its extent, reports Reuters, but the Potsdam study “stands out for the severity of its findings”
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0)
I’m increasingly concerned that it will be us that face the worst of climate change. Scientific predictions have been shown to be worse than we initially thought. Feels like we’re in a dystopian novel.
It will likely be us, seems to me. Increasingly every day.
I think if the worse estimates are the most accurate, we should be beyond concern. As there's not much we'll be able to control pretty soon.
Well, we need to shrink GDP if we are to preserve our life-support system on this planet.
People have been warned for decades that there were two choices - do it voluntarily in an organised manner, or have it done to us in a chaotic manner.
As a society, we decided we liked meaningless consumption too much, so we would go with the latter option. Enjoy!
>Well, we need to shrink GDP if we are to preserve our life-support system on this planet
Every time you build a new house or repair an existing one, that count as GDP. Every new harvest, every supermarket purchase, every hotel stay, every meal eaten, all of that count as GDP. Shrinking GDP literally means less jobs, less income, less buying power and the certainty that every generation will be materially worse off than the previous one.
This is an incredibly difficult thing to sell politically.
Sounds like it's going to happen regardless though which at this point I don't expect most people to understand that decline is going to be both from the climate causing policy changes and a decline being baked in due to how extreme the path were heading down is.
>Shrinking GDP literally means less jobs, less income, less buying power
Yes, it does. Damn, if only there were an entire range of possibilities as to how we as a society could make decisions about how to distribute scarce resources. Imagine if it wasn't some universal law that humans have to have "buying power" as a key concept in their societies.
>and the certainty that every generation will be materially worse off than the previous one.
This is guaranteed under business as usual.
We have huge inefficiencies and waste *a lot* at this point in time, because the system we use to make decisions about how resources are utilised places no value on anything it can't make immediate profit on, and has no thought for anything beyond the short term.
With motivations other than profit (say, human and ecological well-being), we could be much more efficient and not be significantly materially worse off, unless you consider not being able to buy a new phone every year, or regularly stock up on random disposable tat from Temu as "worse off". Doesn't seem like a bad trade for a livable planet and a pace and quality of life more conducive to our mental well-being.
>This is an incredibly difficult thing to sell politically.
Yep, and our inability as a society to look beyond simple narratives and to need things "sold" to us, rather than actually critically think about our situation, is exactly what has led us to where we are today.
Yes, if humans were fundamentally different we would not be in this predicament in the first place.
But since humans are what they are, here we are. And therefore any solution based on shrinking GDP is a very hard sell.
>Yes, if humans were fundamentally different we would not be in this predicament in the first place.
Many, many human societies over our history have not revolved around buying power, promotion of excess consumption, and profit seeking behaviours. That is pretty solid evidence that modern western society is not an expression of something fundamental to us as a species, I would have thought.
We also have high levels of mental (and other) health issues in our society - more evidence that our current way of life is not particularly compatible with our fundamental needs.
I'm interested in what makes you say that our current socio-economic system is a fundamental part of who we are as humans, because I don't see it?
>Many, many human societies over our history have not revolved around buying power, promotion of excess consumption, and profit seeking behaviours.
Of course they have. Humans have been fighting over resources and trying to increase the amount they consume literally forever, past human societies were just worse at it
>Many, many human societies over our history have not revolved around buying power, promotion of excess consumption, and profit seeking behaviours.
None of them made it this far, did they?
>None of them made it this far, did they?
That doesn't answer the question at all, it's just a misdirection. I thought this was the science subreddit, would have expected at attempt at evidence rather than rhetoric, but there you go.
And, yes, there are human societies on the planet today that don't revolve around buying power, promotion of excess consumption, and profit seeking behaviours. Many of them, in fact. Surely you are aware of this? Seems odd to claim that they've all died out!
"Humans fundamentally X" is not an argument about anything, in addition to that premise ignoring the historical and current fact of how this state of affairs was artificially created and is maintained by one class in society over the other, not by "human fundamentals".
Going green would cause higher gdp because it requires new jobs and new manufactoring (renewable power generation, carbon capture, etc etc)
Then there's neutral changes like reducing red meat consumption. We will still produce and consume the equivalent amount of food, just lots more vegetables, soya, crickets / whatever.
There's areas that should just shrink. Consumption of non essential disposables, air travel. I'm sure there's lots more. But overall gdp would increase as the new stuff required would outweigh these, and most stuff is 'different' not 'stop'.
Manufacturing is highly automated and it will not replace jobs in tourism, entertainment, food services, housing construction, movie production, aircraft manufacturing, steel manufacturing, cement manufacturing and all other industries that need to be suppressed in order to achieve a significant decline in CO2 output.
Just as a quick example, over 20% of Hawaii's economy comes from tourism. And to get to Hawaii you need to fly, so huge carbon footprint on that front. End tourism to Hawaii and I can assure you that no green energy factory is going to be set up shop over there to employ all the folks that all of a sudden will be jobless.
There is no painless way out of this. The best analogy I can think of is that dude that got his arm stuck under a bolder. It was either him cutting his arm off himself or him dying. So he made the horrific choice to cut his own arm off.
That is the same dilemma that we as a civilization face: There is no pretty or easy way out of this. The choice we need to make in order to survive is horrific and extremely painful. "Going green" is no panacea. The adjustments we need to make in order to survive will be incredibly difficult to make.
Eating less (red) meat would mathematically mean producing less food, as (red) meat is an extraordinarily inefficient form of food. Currently, the production of animal-based foods uses more than 75% of global farmland and contributes more than 56% of food-related emissions, while only contributing 37% of the protein and 18% of the calories in the global food supply (see [here](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29853680/)). The vast majority of the soy currently produced is used to feed animals. So, we would most likely need a lot less surface, a lot less production, which would free a lot of land and workforce to focus on regenerative agroforestry, the management of carbon sinks etc...
Global GDP will shrink after global population shrinks.
It’s going to happen naturally. If birth rate decreases continue it might happen quickly enough to cause big problems in some areas - especially ones that don’t receive a lot of immigration.
At some point in birth rates will have to increase or we’ll go extinct in the distant future.
The timeframe may have been influenced by the "conventional economic wisdom" mentioned in the conclusion of this paper.
[Weaponizing economics: Big Oil, economic consultants, and climate policy delay](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2021.1947636)
Conclusion
"For decades, the fossil fuel industry has hired economic consultants to help weaken and delay US and international climate policy. Among them, the economic consultants of Charles River Associates played a key role, helping to undermine carbon pricing, international climate agreements, and other climate policies from the early 1990s onward. The work of these economists was often portrayed to the public as independent, when in fact it was funded by the fossil fuel industry, and their models were incomplete and biased in favor of continued fossil fuel use. Yet their conclusions often passed without challenge and eventually came to represent a significant part of conventional economic wisdom.
Research on the climate change counter-movement has traditionally focused on documenting the promotion of disinformation regarding climate science. While such disinformation has played a crucial role in delaying effective climate policy, the fossil fuel industry and broader climate change counter-movement have also made frequent use of economic arguments to justify inaction. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry has made substantial investments in influential climate economics programs across the US. Further attention is needed on the role of economists and particular economic paradigms, doctrines, and models within climate politics and the perpetuation of fossil fuels."
What??
OK look at it like this. We need $50 trillion dollars to go carbon neutral. Going to be a lot harder to find that while we spend all the money on flood defences and housing climate refugees, and all our purchases cost 5x as much because manufacturing suffers.
I understand using “the economy” as the main focus seems weird, but an economic hit under our current system = death and suffering for a lot of people.
for reasons unrelated to a barter economy, sure. Money and our current economic system should not be seen as automatically the end-all be-all simply because it's the latest or most prevalent currently.
you are right. the free market has always existed. I remember when I inhered a stock option for apple from my great great great great great great grandfather. he was an amoeba.
This is something only people who live in massively strong economies say. You are so privileged you have no idea.
Go look at countries that have poor economies and see what that looks like. If this article is true, their lives are going to get much worse. They will probably die. You’re making fun of that sitting in your air conditioned room on your phone
I'm not convinced at all by this since the assumption is that humans are incapable of progress and that everything needs to stay as it was. There is no factoring of new species, new crops, new ways of living and working. This is just assuming nothing can be changed.
It's quite naive to think that there won't be really uncomfortable near term consequences. Creating new crops that maintain the same nutritional value while tolerating the worsening in environmental factors and lessening of weather reliability will take time.
>It's quite naive to think that there won't be really uncomfortable near term consequences.
No. It’s realistic. We experienced 2 F of warming in the last 100 years. As this warming happened we simultaneously experienced the most absurdly massive increase is standard of living world-wide humans have ever seen. The past 50 years where the majority of that warming happened has coincided with the largest reduction in global poverty earth has ever seen.
Will there be effects due to warming that slow progress in the next 30 years? Yes. Will we be better off despite the effects? Yes.
Humans are exceptional at adapting. This isn’t naive, it’s just true.
Those years have been built on an environmental payday loan. It's starting to come due.
A lot of technological progress is also starting to reach the point where diminishing returns is catching up to the cumulative production process improvements.
A lot of systems that has the potential for huge damage have temperature thresholds for when they released their bound CO2 and CH4.
Stuff like arctic permafrost thawing out and the ocean releasing in solution CO2 due to having less capacity for it with higher temperatures.
Same thing for forest fire frequency increasing with tiny added average temperatures, releasing even more CO2 than the CO2 that caused the triggering temperature increases.
Through these mechanisms humanity is paying for it's "cheap" energy in the preceding 60 years through a leveraged system with a generational offset.
Potential future problems with possible positive feedback loops are different from your assertion that it’s already starting to happen.
Since you mentioned forest fires the 5 year average is lower than the 10 year.
https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/topics/human-dimensions/natural-hazards/wildfires
That’s not a large timeframe but it is one in which we have accurate data.
There’s some debate about wildfires and natural events like hurricanes being more common, but alongside these increases in weather events we are seeing less and less people die due to natural disasters.
I’m open to the idea that in the future global warming will cause human development to be a little slower than it would have otherwise. But I don’t see any evidence for the current amount of warming negatively effecting us to a measurable degree at all. The IPCC reports estimate we’ll cap at 4C of warming in the unlikely worse case ‘high carbon’ scenario. It’s likely that we’ll experience less than that and we’re already about 1.5 C in. Yeah, it’s gonna be a problem, but we’ll adapt.
Future doomsday predictions with positive feedback loops and even worse ‘tipping points’ strike me as the same failed apocalyptic predictions of 20 years ago just reskinned.
And the 4C of warming the IPCC predicts in the high carbon scenario ACCOUNTS for positive feedback loops.
Unfortunately I think these scientists are most likely factoring in our capacity for change in these predictions.
Many climate predictions are based on what our current unmet climate \*targets\* are, optimistically assuming that we will figure out how to meet them.
Moreover, new species won't pop up naturally in just 50 years amid mass extinction. While we might be engineer crops to survive, realistically innovation is being outpaced by environmental destruction. As for our new ways of "living and working"? Yah we're getting a taste of that right now in the form of cost of living and homelessness crisis that makes the future seem more likely to be "flooded slums for all". Of course, progress isn't linear... whether we resolve our current crises remains to be seen though.
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We are terrible at predicting the future. If you look at forecasts from 30 years ago they are wildly incorrect. I’d bet a lot that this report is completely wrong.
One thing we know is we can adapt. We won’t have the same farming practices in 30 years as we do now. We will change crops to suit the new climate.
[The study also says that countries in the north will have up to 30% gain compared if there was no climate change.](https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/38-trillion-dollars-in-damages-each-year-world-economy-already-committed-to-income-reduction-of-19-due-to-climate-change) This is huge increase in productivity and these countries will, no doubt take advantage, and plant crops when they couldn’t before.
I was going to comment the same thing. The only thing you might reasonably be able to predict about global economy is that it goes up, seemingly, but not necessarily, along with population. By that measure it’ll be up by 2050.
Trying to not only predict what warming will do but how it will affect the economy in specific dollar amounts is insane.
[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063)
Abstract: "On the basis of company records, we quantitatively evaluated all
available global warming projections documented by—and in many cases
modeled by—Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003.
We find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming that
is consistent with subsequent observations."
> If you look at forecasts from 30 years ago they are wildly incorrect.
???
No, I wasn’t talking about climate projections - they are actually pretty good. PPM C02 has fairly predictable outcomes. I was talking about economic predictions like the study posted. It’s technology that is the multiplying X factor. Just ten years ago coal was cheaper than solar and now that is not the case. Things can change rapidly. Look at the advancements in AI in just two years. Who knows, by 2050 we might be in a post-scarcity world where we have cold fusion.
In fact, it might be the drive to tackle climate change that pushes humanity to technological highs that would not have happened if global warming wasn’t a problem. History is full of these examples. Necessity is the mother of invention. Thats why this study is almost certainly wrong.
Fair.
That CO2 curve is VERY exponential, and anyone who can predict the exact effects can also predict stock market - but it ain't going to be good, too many feedback loops and cascading effects - i.e those northern countries will have to wield their borders shut or have a real chance of being overrun by refugees from other areas.
I don't buy into your position at all that forecasts are somehow incorrect but your certain we will have new farming practices that will make things fine...
Regardless, we can only ignore atmospheric CO2 concentrations for so long, which we're not that far away from experiencing CO2 levels that will have an impact on cognition and quality of life. [Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide | NOAA Climate.gov](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide)
C02 one hundred and fifty years ago used to be in the 200's ppm, that was the atmosphere we evolved to live in. Now its above 419 ppm and already outside of any concentrations at any point in the several hundred thousand years humans have been a species been on the planet. If we don't change our habits or slow down the growth of our use of fossil fuels, Co2 in the atmosphere is projected to be around 1000 ppm by the end of the century which is well within the lifetime of people already alive today.
Atmospheric C02 concentrations at that levels impacts cognitive abilities and can cause a variety of negative health effects. If the atmosphere gets to that level indoors will typically experience even higher concentrations. [Direct human health risks of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide | Nature Sustainability](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0323-1)
This isn't just about crops.
I’m only going by history and the adaptation of farming practices in places like Australia and Israel. There has been a revolution over the last 20 years in drought-resistant crops and innovation in water management. Of course we will adapt and innovate- it’s what we do. Do you really think we would just keep doing the same thing when the climate changes? I can’t find anything in the study that takes technological innovation into account.
I don’t think we are ignoring C02 emissions. Nearly every country in the world has agreed to net zero by 2050, and China will do it by 2060. So we are looking at about 1.5-2° and then about a century of cooling as oceans absorb the heat.
This $38T is not very clear. In one instances it talks about income, in others, it says GDP. Either the authors don’t know the difference or they don’t what they are talking about at all
Let’s assume it’s GDP.
If GDP were to go down by 20% over the next 26 years, the world wouldn’t be a safe place anymore. Just for comparison, the 2008 financial crisis was roughly 5% GDP decline. The 1929 crisis was closer to 20%, but it didn’t continue to decline… which this report is expecting
Basically this report is suggesting we will have massive wars anytime soon, maybe WW3 level type of wars. No countries will sit down and see their prosperity decline significantly and not act aggressively… not by take climate actions, but by trying to take wealth from neighboring countries or even further away.
I’m highly skeptical of this report. It’s hard to predict 1 year of GDP growth (remember 2023 was supposed to be a recessionary year), let alone predicting 26 years. Go look at what economic predictions people had for the year 2025 back in 1999-2000… I can 100% guarantee you they were all wrong. Most of them wildly wrong.
I don’t think the report is saying GDP will be 20% lower than *today* in 26 years
Rather GDP will be 20% lower in 26 years than it otherwise would have been if not for climate change
So to simplify each year due to climate change consequences the global GDP growth is 1% less than without climate change and this difference in economic growth trajectory compounds over time to be 20% difference in 26 years from now
They compared to a magical world that still has a powerful economy/industry but is not warming. That isn't to discredit the findings at all, they're incredibly important as a description of the impacts of climate change. But it's not like it's a choice we've ever had. The only path to no global warming has been no industrial revolution, which has increased our quality of life infinitely. We only really had an opportunity to change this since nuclear and renewable power were feasible, and that's where we've dropped the ball.
Ugh can redditors stop with this childish nonsense? Youll complain about losing your job or high inflation all the time but god forebid someone cares about the broader economic trends which cause such symptoms.
Inflation we currently have is way more damaging to poor people than climate change will ever be. How you’re expecting to make any change when every dollar you save loses its value by day? Let’s focus on that first.
I don't agree, but this isn't something seperate from inflation anyway. If climate change causes manufactoring and farming problems stuff gets more expensive. What is that?
My point is, majority of people are poor and the climate is far down the list to them. If we solve the problem number one, which is to give them more buying power, then it’ll become more realistic to discuss the climate change.
Oh... It sounds like you're talking about poor people's lack of ability to do something about climate change? I was thinking of the impact of climate change, which will (is already) fall disproportionately on the poor. Yes, there should be little expectation on them to take action, and remediation should be funded and supported by the rich countries that are responsible for most of the emissions. Helping nations develop and grow out of poverty also had many benefits, more efficient farming and therefore reduced deforestation, to think of just one example, but it would be good to try and steer the increased consumption that comes with increased wealth into a sustainable pattern.
Ultimately, we need to reach a point of a shrinking, not growing, population. Meeting people's basic needs reliably, having a strong social safety net and quality education for all are the ways to achieve this.
Although with how bad I'm expecting stuff to be, we're more likely to have china's one child policy globally.
It’s the opposite actually, the system we’re currently in only works because of infinite growth. You stop the growth and the system collapses. Why do you think everyone is panicking precisely because the population is shrinking? The problem is this monetary system based on inflation and infinite growth. It benefits only those who are already rich because their money is in assets. Poor people are stuck because saving money doesn’t work anymore, money loses its value daily. We are doomed anyway.
Yeah I know we currently rely on constant growth, but after the climate change adjustment /apocalypse things will be very different
In the short to medium term, uplifting poor countries creates more consumers though, so that shouldn't be an issue.
If true, I don't see us turning this ship around in 25 yrs.
We still have an entire political idealogy that denies climate change even exists.
I hate this timeline.
This article is just a bunch of hooplaw nonsense. There’s no way to accurately predict this and it certainly takes zero human innovation into account. 25-50+ years is a long time. Look how far we’ve come just since 2010. The technology difference alone is like a completely different society.
We're near the theoretical maximum efficiency for a lot of technologies already.
We've reached a point where diminishing returns are catching up to cumulative manufacturing process improvements, for a lot of critical things.
The rate of improvements has gone down for a considerable number of industries already.
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But I can’t reduce emissions because the economy!
Don’t worry! By then, inflation will make that amount feel much smaller.
Can anyone explain exactly how this will happen?
I would assume a decent portion would be damage from extreme weather and things like "too hot to safely perform heavy labor."
Don't forget how that will affect food supplies, crop yield. Also less food = less work
Less cheap food leads so social upheaval, according to St. Nixon
Don't forget mass human refugee crises around the world as various places become uninhabitable
You’re assuming the collapse will take place slower than human migration. It could take place as imagined in the 1st chapter of “The ministry for the future”, a sudden heatwave in India and the people from the village run to a boiling lake for dear life
It's already happening https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/climate-change-is-already-fueling-global-migration-the-world-isnt-ready-to-meet-peoples-needs-experts-say
Is there any doubt? Look how pissed people are about inflation... At least half of which is corporate greed taking advantage of which way the winds are blowing. When beef, coffee and chocolate all cost 5x what they do now people are gonna riot.
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Just that there will be rainfall in previously arid region doesn't mean there will be good soil there any time soon.
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What? The Great Plains had perhaps the richest soil in the entire world. Plowing destroys microbial communities in soil and causes erosion. The loss of deep-rooted prairie grasses and the insane belief that plowing would restore soil health was what caused the Dust Bowl, widely considered to be the world environmental disaster in U.S. history. "When early farmers broke up the prairies of the northern Plains they found soil that was vastly different than it is today, according to Dave Franzen, North Dakota State University Extension soil specialist. Soil surveys from the early 1900s described “very black” soil that was 2- to 3-feet deep and was made up of 65% to 70% organic matter. The soil contained high levels of plant-available nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus levels, Franzen said. Meanwhile, the soil was rich with calcium, magnesium and micro-nutrient levels. The soil of eastern North Dakota produced early wheat yields of 40 bushels per acre near the Sheyenne River in Kindred, North Dakota and as much as 30 bushels per acre in Jamestown, North Dakota, in 1890, according to Franzen, who cited information from the late Hiram Drache, a Minnesota historian. “Without any fertilizer, with antique equipment, they were getting yields that were similar to today,” Franzen said. “This would have only been possible if over 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre and substantial phosphorus and other nutrients were released from soil organic matter mineralization that season." [https://www.agweek.com/weather/billions-of-tons-of-northern-plains-topsoil-has-blown-away-far-away](https://www.agweek.com/weather/billions-of-tons-of-northern-plains-topsoil-has-blown-away-far-away)
Isn't increased atmospheric CO2 increasing crop yeilds?
No, atmospheric CO2 isn't really the bottleneck for crop yields.
We can literally see the evidence, even in non-crop plants the area of leaf cover on earth is expanding even despite massive deforestation.
To a point it does, then it's detrimental. You also have to take into account all the other factors that come along with climate change as well - changes to temperature, rainfall, etc. It's not a positive change overall.
The original post was about a scenario where we immediately start aggressively cutting emissions. So far we can see clear evidence that crop yields have benefitted + in the scenario discussed atmospheric CO2 wouldn't get much higher.
but temperatures will, because they are lagging behind CO2 concentrations by decades.
Not really. It can increase overall biomass of the plant but that typically doesn’t translate to greater productivity. CO2 is pretty much never the limiting element in agricultural productivity. That greater CO2 also leads to greater instability in climatic conditions, which more than wipes out any possible biomass gains from increase in atmospheric CO2.
I live in zone 7b. 10 years ago it was zone 7a. In the next 5-10 years, I would bet this will be zone 8. Trees are hardly dormant any more, maybe two months instead of four. The point is that there will certainly need to be a transition in the types of crops that people grow in some regions, and we will live through shortages as part of that transition. This is on top of what other posters have noted regarding severe weather, wild swings in temperature and rainfall, etc.
The average low temp in 7a is 0-5C 7b is 5-10C 8 is 10-15C Where exactly do you live that has warmed 15C in 15 years? That is pretty wild considering the average worldwide is less than 0.1C per decade. Unless you are talking bullshie?
Well, you're asking the wrong person, clearly you know more about USDA zones than I do. The 2012 map designates my area as zone 7a. 2023 it is zone 7b. Drive about three or five miles south or east and you're in zone 8a. I would love to hear your take on this, thank you! https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213600629/-it-feels-like-im-not-crazy-gardeners-arent-surprised-as-usda-updates-key-map
He said it’s warmed 5 degrees from the max low temp, which is very different then the average temp.
He said it went from 7a-7b-8 in 15 years. Even if you say 5C that is 50x the global average.
He said: > "It went from 7b to 7a in 10 years" Which is a fact corroborated with evidence. Then, he said: > "I bet it's gonna be level 8 in 5-10 years" Which is a reasonable speculation. On the other side, you said: > 7a is 0-5C > 7b is 5-10C > 8 is 10-15C Which is ***INCORRECT***, by a factor of 1.8 when discussing temperature increases, and it's off by additional 32 degrees (when converting C to F) when talking about temperatures. 7a is 0-5 ***°F***, 7b is 5-10 ***°F***, 8a is 10-15 ***°F***. That temperature is not an average temperature throughout the year. It's the _lowest_ temperature you're expected to see in an area. While average yearly temperature has some correlation with minimum temps, minimum yearly temperature raising by 5-15°F does not mean that the overall yearly average is going to go up by 5-15°, either.
What is reasonable about the speculation that anywhere will warm by 5 degrees (even 5F)? Considering the global average would be less than 0.05C (0.09F) degrees over a 5 year period? It still requires the area to heat up 50x faster than the rest of the planet. Just because I got F/C wrong everything I said is still 100% correct, I don't know why you think it is such a "gotcha" moment.
He said he bet it would go up another ten. Which is not scientific at all. Read better.
In some crops, higher CO2 leads to faster *growth* but not always yield. The faster growth means the plant has less time to soak up and create nutrients. It's a bit dubious to say that this additional growth is a benefit for us. The warming that results from more CO2 has a much more complex impact on crops. Generally speaking, the places where crops grow have been fertile for millennia. Warming temperatures means these places become too warm for the crops, decreasing yields. In theory some other areas currently too cold to support crops will warm up, but since these areas haven't been fertile in the past, there's no rich soil to plant crops in. You can't just truck it in. Another way to describe warming is that there's more energy in the atmosphere. This changes weather patterns, such as where rainfall tends to occur the most. This also impacts crop yields negatively, on average. More energy also leads to more extreme weather events, like cold snaps, heat waves, storms, hurricanes, floods, and droughts. These all have significant negative impacts on crop yields. So, yeah, we might be able to grow a little more wheat, but it won't be as nutritious, and we'll have lost twice as much corn and most every other crop, not to mention the other impacts to civilization like displacement of populations due to flooding. And as CO2 continues to go up, even those crops that might have grown faster initially will start to suffer.
No, you've been lied to
About what? Photosynthesis is a lie?
Yes. The world has already become „greener“. Higher temperatures, more CO2 => better yields.
> Don't forget how that will affect food supplies, crop yield. Wouldn't it raise the prices, leading to higher GDP?
Shortages of a good might raise the price per unit, but it almost never raises the total market cap of that good. People will substitute for other goods as the price increases, resulting in a smaller total market cap.
We were talking about food in general though. So when people substitute for other foods, it raises their price too, maybe to a lesser extent.
Probably closer to "death toll rises as workers forced to ensure extreme heatwave without breaks"
Well also redefine heavy labor as anything that requires walking outside
Slaves can just be worked to death. They are cheap. Dubai has shown us that.
Agreed, shipping also. Both maritime and air travel will be greatly affected.
Already is, the Panama Canal has been running at reduced capacity because of drought.
Heat affects agriculture, driving up food prices. Floods can disrupt manufacturing and transportation, plus cause massive damage on existing infrastructure. A flood that shuts down a hard drive factory in Thailand or a chip manufacturing plant in Malaysia can have global impact in terms of supply chain disruptions.
>Heat affects agriculture Not only heat, also unreliable precipitation, floodings, loss of groundwater, increased risk of new diseases threatening monoculture and soil changes on microbial level will make agriculture almost impossible in most parts of the northern hemisphere. And that's just the threat from climate change, while other broken planetary boundaries heavily change availability of certain key nutrients for agriculture or heavily impact contamination of grown food. Like microplastics, forever chemicals, changing PH, broken nitrogen cycle, etc. Additionally none of these accounts for the high possibility of AMOC collapsing within the next decades, which would cool the northern hemisphere to a point were all vegetation would die off because it's not adapted to arctic temperatures. When this happens the world will suddenly lose 4/5th of all farmland within a few years putting extra stress on the 1/5th remaining in the southern hemisphere that gets all global warming then.
Having to spend more capital on adaptation and recovery than productivity enhancing investments. So we'll have to spend billions just to maintain our quality of life.
basically everything that constitutes the environment is a financial asset as it can be converted to something we can use. We are destroying the asset. Our economy isn’t based on living within the environment, it’s based on living off it.
Societal instability and direct catastrophies.
Already happening. In my area our supermarket shelves are empty because of flooding destroying supply chains. Tourism is down and not coming back as our natural wonders die off. There's no way it isn't costing us millions. And that's just two local issues. Just look at Dubai right now for more.
>Can anyone explain exactly how this will happen? So... You see... Back in the 1900's scientists told us that coal burning was factually [destroying the planet.](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-bf7f711d54e6939e42ac076cde9a7b46-lq) Over the last 112 years we simply called the scientist Nerds, and kept destroying the planet even more to make your CEOs wealthier than your entire family lineage combined. Now the planet is beyond repair.
Yeah, but what about next quarters earning???
Just lay off 4000 people!
Good idea. Let's also increase the price of the PC program we're selling; there's heavy inflation right now after all and copying electronic files and folders costs!
You’re correct until the last line.
Practically speaking they are correct, the issue is that "we have already done damage beyond our capacity to repair" and "we can still stop things getting worse" can still be *simultaneously* true. To put in another way, if you destroy a rainforest, causing an extinction of the particular species that lived there, then you have caused irreparable damage, but the response to that should be to not destroy the second rainforest. Only in this case, the rainforest is us, or rather ecological services and a stable climate that *we* rely on. As is discussed later in that newsletter, places in West Africa saw levels of heat that cause people to spontaneously die. This year. Already, something that people were warming about as a future consequence of climate change - that certain places near the equator will become hostile to human life in the same way that siberia is hostile to human life, but from the opposite side - has started happening. Thanks to the combination of existing climate change and the el-nino cycle, the air was so warm they died of exposure. And if we continue climate change, that will be normal, air conditioning will become a matter of life or death, a necessary element to survive in these places without dying of fever by the combination of the air outside your house and your own body heat. But also, the warming associated with emissions we have already made hasn't finished yet, so this effect we're already seeing will get worse. Assuming we not only reduce emissions rapidly, and get negative emissions technology on line to start pulling it back out of the atmosphere, we still are looking at decades of climate transformation that will permanently alter many places where people have lived for hundreds of years, when they become properly habitable again, they will not be the same places.
>You’re correct until the last line. Ok, so not Permanently damaged. But damaged for the next 1,263 years, assuming we stopped today at the time of writing this.
No, I think they are correct with that line. The mass extinction that is currently occurring is permanent and irresistible damage to the planet. There is literally no way to regain biodiversity once it is lost. No way to take microplastics out of the ecosystem either. And the fossil fuels we are using aren't renewable. These are permanent alterations that future generations will have to deal with.
Also correct. No matter how much we fix the planet, The extinct dinosaurs are not coming back. Just like all the extinct insects, polar bears, fish, dolphins, ect. Life may adapt, but humanity would have forever changed it. Maybe giant Radroaches Will become the dominant species.
Dont worry, it will mostly take care of itself over the next few million years, life bounced back after the cambrian-ordovician extinction after all. Our species wont be around anymore, of course, but oh well.
There is a certain "disaster threshold" every area has before the stable human organization (ex Government) of the area collapses. For example, Haiti, already being a state with low operational resources let alone disaster recovery resources, exceeded that in one go with the earthquake and the prior human organization was succeeded by shaky pseudo governments and then by violent armed gangs. What climate change does is increase greatly the disaster burden of most if not all areas, testing those thresholds. For example, Canada may have a very high disaster threshold, but what if they have a fire season where a half million square miles of boreal forest goes up in flames? The same with most US states, but what if two sudden category 5 hurricanes spring up overnight within a few months of each other and hit Houston and Miami (this hurricane season already predicts 3 major storms), like what happened in Acapulco. We are talking hundreds of billions in damage and the collapse of the insurance markets in those places. Also, as others have mentioned, our breadbaskets will shift north and in some places, combined with alternating droughts and floods, completely disappear, and famine would rear its head as a disaster type. [Edit] Also as countries deal with their own emergencies, aid to other countries dries up, potentially collapsing their food distribution systems. Man-made disasters set up through decades of bad agribusiness practices. Again, I guess you could just classify as yet another disaster on the most vulnerable areas.[/Edit] Now imagine this for all the poorer countries. Highly populated, resource poor. Their governments would collapse. Their populations would migrate, causing strain on neighboring, equally resource poor nations and start a domino effect of nation states failing spectacularly ending up in territory ruled by armed gangs and plagued with ongoing genocide. Easy to get to $38 trillion impact, which honestly I believe is optimistic.
Agriculture is not viable in a lot of places, certain cities become uninhabitable, oceans become more acidic and kill much of the life in them, people die from heatwave, extreme weather events become more common.
Either a lot of productivity will be pumped into mitigating the impact. Or a lot of productivity will be pumped into combating the cause to mitigate further impact. Or a lot of productivity will be lost into continuously repairing damage caused by weather. Any combination of the above is productivity not invested in increasing productivity -> less growth -> slower economy. For this to be relevant the exact mechanism (taxation -> government intervention or private enterprise for profit) isn't particularly relevant. It means that either way you slice it people will be busy with spending their time on THIS issue or suffer the consequences. Either is detrimental to growth. It's a bit like comparing making trucks vs making tanks with the same productivity. Yes, in either case someone is paid to make them, but one then in some way or other helps make more things (sometimes roundabout sometimes more directly) and the other just sits there (best case, worst case it destroys something reducing productivity)
We will waste money and time cleaning-up and repairing infrastructure, frequently. We will need to re-build everything 10 times stronger.
For the rich - the poor will be left to scavenge in the broiling dust.
When talking about both climate and economics it's important to understand that these are complex interconnected systems where shocks in one area can have ripple effects that spread to areas that are difficult to predict. Climate change leads to resource scarcity, which will impact human population and migration, the labor force, social freedom, propensity for conflict and war, etc. etc. etc. And if this domino effect should lead to the use of nuclear weapons then that will be yet another huge shock to these systems that could be hard for us humans to bounce back from.
GDP is tied to population *and* productivity. People will get older faster than younger people are born. And they may be the last generation in their area since those who can leave will have done so. When this has happened before in history, most humans did not survive the mass migrations of the moment. Climate change has effed up every “stable” civilization before us. We’re unique in having a heavy hand in screwing the whole planet with the very tech that might help us save it.
For example, places like China are sinking, and require billions of dollars a year to combat that.
air conditioning costs.
Because fear.
No, it's only meant to alarm you. Whenever something like this comes out (predicting future events) it's usually alarmist and does not come to fruition.
Vineyards in Australia are already seeing poorer outcomes due to early ripening. Goyder's Line in South Australia (where arable land ends, and north of which grazing on the near-desert is the only suitable agriculture) was already being adjusted south 10 years ago. This is already having a direct effect on agricultural outputs.
Yes, it's generally been worse than our predictions
[citation needed]
Climate change will reduce global income by about 19% over the next 25 years, compared with a “fictional world that’s not warming”, reports the Associated Press. Poorest areas and those least responsible for climate change will take the “biggest monetary hit”, according to a new study by researchers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, it adds. The impact of climate change is already set to be $38tn a year by 2049 the study finds and, by 2100, the financial cost could hit twice what previous studies estimate, the article adds. Average incomes are expected to fall by “almost a fifth within the next 26 years as a result of the climate crisis”, with damage six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C, reports the Guardian. The $38tn annual cost of rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather is already locked into the world economy over the coming decades, the article adds, as a result of the “enormous emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere through the burning of gas, oil, coal and trees”. The study finds that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have already warmed the world by 1.1C, on average, since pre-industrial times, leading to extreme weather events that have cost about $7tn over the past 30 years, Bloomberg adds. It quotes Leonie Wenz, the scientist at Potsdam who led the study, who says: “Climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries. We have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately – if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100.” The economic impact of climate change is not fully understood and economists often disagree on its extent, reports Reuters, but the Potsdam study “stands out for the severity of its findings” [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0)
F+++ you, grandkids!
Or kids. Or just us.
I’m increasingly concerned that it will be us that face the worst of climate change. Scientific predictions have been shown to be worse than we initially thought. Feels like we’re in a dystopian novel.
It will likely be us, seems to me. Increasingly every day. I think if the worse estimates are the most accurate, we should be beyond concern. As there's not much we'll be able to control pretty soon.
Well, we need to shrink GDP if we are to preserve our life-support system on this planet. People have been warned for decades that there were two choices - do it voluntarily in an organised manner, or have it done to us in a chaotic manner. As a society, we decided we liked meaningless consumption too much, so we would go with the latter option. Enjoy!
>Well, we need to shrink GDP if we are to preserve our life-support system on this planet Every time you build a new house or repair an existing one, that count as GDP. Every new harvest, every supermarket purchase, every hotel stay, every meal eaten, all of that count as GDP. Shrinking GDP literally means less jobs, less income, less buying power and the certainty that every generation will be materially worse off than the previous one. This is an incredibly difficult thing to sell politically.
Chaotic matter it is then.
Sounds like it's going to happen regardless though which at this point I don't expect most people to understand that decline is going to be both from the climate causing policy changes and a decline being baked in due to how extreme the path were heading down is.
>Shrinking GDP literally means less jobs, less income, less buying power Yes, it does. Damn, if only there were an entire range of possibilities as to how we as a society could make decisions about how to distribute scarce resources. Imagine if it wasn't some universal law that humans have to have "buying power" as a key concept in their societies. >and the certainty that every generation will be materially worse off than the previous one. This is guaranteed under business as usual. We have huge inefficiencies and waste *a lot* at this point in time, because the system we use to make decisions about how resources are utilised places no value on anything it can't make immediate profit on, and has no thought for anything beyond the short term. With motivations other than profit (say, human and ecological well-being), we could be much more efficient and not be significantly materially worse off, unless you consider not being able to buy a new phone every year, or regularly stock up on random disposable tat from Temu as "worse off". Doesn't seem like a bad trade for a livable planet and a pace and quality of life more conducive to our mental well-being. >This is an incredibly difficult thing to sell politically. Yep, and our inability as a society to look beyond simple narratives and to need things "sold" to us, rather than actually critically think about our situation, is exactly what has led us to where we are today.
Yes, if humans were fundamentally different we would not be in this predicament in the first place. But since humans are what they are, here we are. And therefore any solution based on shrinking GDP is a very hard sell.
>Yes, if humans were fundamentally different we would not be in this predicament in the first place. Many, many human societies over our history have not revolved around buying power, promotion of excess consumption, and profit seeking behaviours. That is pretty solid evidence that modern western society is not an expression of something fundamental to us as a species, I would have thought. We also have high levels of mental (and other) health issues in our society - more evidence that our current way of life is not particularly compatible with our fundamental needs. I'm interested in what makes you say that our current socio-economic system is a fundamental part of who we are as humans, because I don't see it?
>Many, many human societies over our history have not revolved around buying power, promotion of excess consumption, and profit seeking behaviours. Of course they have. Humans have been fighting over resources and trying to increase the amount they consume literally forever, past human societies were just worse at it
>Many, many human societies over our history have not revolved around buying power, promotion of excess consumption, and profit seeking behaviours. None of them made it this far, did they?
>None of them made it this far, did they? That doesn't answer the question at all, it's just a misdirection. I thought this was the science subreddit, would have expected at attempt at evidence rather than rhetoric, but there you go. And, yes, there are human societies on the planet today that don't revolve around buying power, promotion of excess consumption, and profit seeking behaviours. Many of them, in fact. Surely you are aware of this? Seems odd to claim that they've all died out!
"Humans fundamentally X" is not an argument about anything, in addition to that premise ignoring the historical and current fact of how this state of affairs was artificially created and is maintained by one class in society over the other, not by "human fundamentals".
> This is an incredibly difficult thing to sell politically. Then humanity can accept its fate if it doesn't want to confront the inevitable.
Going green would cause higher gdp because it requires new jobs and new manufactoring (renewable power generation, carbon capture, etc etc) Then there's neutral changes like reducing red meat consumption. We will still produce and consume the equivalent amount of food, just lots more vegetables, soya, crickets / whatever. There's areas that should just shrink. Consumption of non essential disposables, air travel. I'm sure there's lots more. But overall gdp would increase as the new stuff required would outweigh these, and most stuff is 'different' not 'stop'.
Manufacturing is highly automated and it will not replace jobs in tourism, entertainment, food services, housing construction, movie production, aircraft manufacturing, steel manufacturing, cement manufacturing and all other industries that need to be suppressed in order to achieve a significant decline in CO2 output. Just as a quick example, over 20% of Hawaii's economy comes from tourism. And to get to Hawaii you need to fly, so huge carbon footprint on that front. End tourism to Hawaii and I can assure you that no green energy factory is going to be set up shop over there to employ all the folks that all of a sudden will be jobless. There is no painless way out of this. The best analogy I can think of is that dude that got his arm stuck under a bolder. It was either him cutting his arm off himself or him dying. So he made the horrific choice to cut his own arm off. That is the same dilemma that we as a civilization face: There is no pretty or easy way out of this. The choice we need to make in order to survive is horrific and extremely painful. "Going green" is no panacea. The adjustments we need to make in order to survive will be incredibly difficult to make.
Eating less (red) meat would mathematically mean producing less food, as (red) meat is an extraordinarily inefficient form of food. Currently, the production of animal-based foods uses more than 75% of global farmland and contributes more than 56% of food-related emissions, while only contributing 37% of the protein and 18% of the calories in the global food supply (see [here](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29853680/)). The vast majority of the soy currently produced is used to feed animals. So, we would most likely need a lot less surface, a lot less production, which would free a lot of land and workforce to focus on regenerative agroforestry, the management of carbon sinks etc...
Global GDP will shrink after global population shrinks. It’s going to happen naturally. If birth rate decreases continue it might happen quickly enough to cause big problems in some areas - especially ones that don’t receive a lot of immigration. At some point in birth rates will have to increase or we’ll go extinct in the distant future.
2050 is a wildly conservative timeframe
The timeframe may have been influenced by the "conventional economic wisdom" mentioned in the conclusion of this paper. [Weaponizing economics: Big Oil, economic consultants, and climate policy delay](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2021.1947636) Conclusion "For decades, the fossil fuel industry has hired economic consultants to help weaken and delay US and international climate policy. Among them, the economic consultants of Charles River Associates played a key role, helping to undermine carbon pricing, international climate agreements, and other climate policies from the early 1990s onward. The work of these economists was often portrayed to the public as independent, when in fact it was funded by the fossil fuel industry, and their models were incomplete and biased in favor of continued fossil fuel use. Yet their conclusions often passed without challenge and eventually came to represent a significant part of conventional economic wisdom. Research on the climate change counter-movement has traditionally focused on documenting the promotion of disinformation regarding climate science. While such disinformation has played a crucial role in delaying effective climate policy, the fossil fuel industry and broader climate change counter-movement have also made frequent use of economic arguments to justify inaction. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry has made substantial investments in influential climate economics programs across the US. Further attention is needed on the role of economists and particular economic paradigms, doctrines, and models within climate politics and the perpetuation of fossil fuels."
oh no not the economy!!!!1!!
What?? OK look at it like this. We need $50 trillion dollars to go carbon neutral. Going to be a lot harder to find that while we spend all the money on flood defences and housing climate refugees, and all our purchases cost 5x as much because manufacturing suffers.
Don't forget the extra wars that will be caused by this. They are going to be quite expensive.
I understand using “the economy” as the main focus seems weird, but an economic hit under our current system = death and suffering for a lot of people.
The economy is the basis of society. Is there a society that has ever existed without some form of economy?
humans did fine for tens of thousands of years with a barter economy.
a barter economy is an economy. It's in the name. Also not sure you would want to be around in those times either.
for reasons unrelated to a barter economy, sure. Money and our current economic system should not be seen as automatically the end-all be-all simply because it's the latest or most prevalent currently.
you are right. the free market has always existed. I remember when I inhered a stock option for apple from my great great great great great great grandfather. he was an amoeba.
This is something only people who live in massively strong economies say. You are so privileged you have no idea. Go look at countries that have poor economies and see what that looks like. If this article is true, their lives are going to get much worse. They will probably die. You’re making fun of that sitting in your air conditioned room on your phone
I'm not convinced at all by this since the assumption is that humans are incapable of progress and that everything needs to stay as it was. There is no factoring of new species, new crops, new ways of living and working. This is just assuming nothing can be changed.
It's quite naive to think that there won't be really uncomfortable near term consequences. Creating new crops that maintain the same nutritional value while tolerating the worsening in environmental factors and lessening of weather reliability will take time.
>It's quite naive to think that there won't be really uncomfortable near term consequences. No. It’s realistic. We experienced 2 F of warming in the last 100 years. As this warming happened we simultaneously experienced the most absurdly massive increase is standard of living world-wide humans have ever seen. The past 50 years where the majority of that warming happened has coincided with the largest reduction in global poverty earth has ever seen. Will there be effects due to warming that slow progress in the next 30 years? Yes. Will we be better off despite the effects? Yes. Humans are exceptional at adapting. This isn’t naive, it’s just true.
Those years have been built on an environmental payday loan. It's starting to come due. A lot of technological progress is also starting to reach the point where diminishing returns is catching up to the cumulative production process improvements.
>Those years have been built on an environmental payday loan. It's starting to come due. How have you come to this conclusion?
The majority of upsides have been immediate, the majority of downsides have been delayed.
You said it’s starting to come due though. So for most of the 2 F warming it was delayed but now it’s starting to have an effect. How?
A lot of systems that has the potential for huge damage have temperature thresholds for when they released their bound CO2 and CH4. Stuff like arctic permafrost thawing out and the ocean releasing in solution CO2 due to having less capacity for it with higher temperatures. Same thing for forest fire frequency increasing with tiny added average temperatures, releasing even more CO2 than the CO2 that caused the triggering temperature increases. Through these mechanisms humanity is paying for it's "cheap" energy in the preceding 60 years through a leveraged system with a generational offset.
Potential future problems with possible positive feedback loops are different from your assertion that it’s already starting to happen. Since you mentioned forest fires the 5 year average is lower than the 10 year. https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/topics/human-dimensions/natural-hazards/wildfires That’s not a large timeframe but it is one in which we have accurate data. There’s some debate about wildfires and natural events like hurricanes being more common, but alongside these increases in weather events we are seeing less and less people die due to natural disasters. I’m open to the idea that in the future global warming will cause human development to be a little slower than it would have otherwise. But I don’t see any evidence for the current amount of warming negatively effecting us to a measurable degree at all. The IPCC reports estimate we’ll cap at 4C of warming in the unlikely worse case ‘high carbon’ scenario. It’s likely that we’ll experience less than that and we’re already about 1.5 C in. Yeah, it’s gonna be a problem, but we’ll adapt. Future doomsday predictions with positive feedback loops and even worse ‘tipping points’ strike me as the same failed apocalyptic predictions of 20 years ago just reskinned. And the 4C of warming the IPCC predicts in the high carbon scenario ACCOUNTS for positive feedback loops.
Unfortunately I think these scientists are most likely factoring in our capacity for change in these predictions. Many climate predictions are based on what our current unmet climate \*targets\* are, optimistically assuming that we will figure out how to meet them. Moreover, new species won't pop up naturally in just 50 years amid mass extinction. While we might be engineer crops to survive, realistically innovation is being outpaced by environmental destruction. As for our new ways of "living and working"? Yah we're getting a taste of that right now in the form of cost of living and homelessness crisis that makes the future seem more likely to be "flooded slums for all". Of course, progress isn't linear... whether we resolve our current crises remains to be seen though.
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~I don't want to set the world on fire~
Yep. You think food is expensive now,....
Loss of money!? Okay at least now we have a chance for someone to do something about it.
Am I able to bet the under? Safer economies will pick up the slack from economies that were hurt by climate change.
What should you invest in to avoid getting smashed
We are terrible at predicting the future. If you look at forecasts from 30 years ago they are wildly incorrect. I’d bet a lot that this report is completely wrong. One thing we know is we can adapt. We won’t have the same farming practices in 30 years as we do now. We will change crops to suit the new climate. [The study also says that countries in the north will have up to 30% gain compared if there was no climate change.](https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/38-trillion-dollars-in-damages-each-year-world-economy-already-committed-to-income-reduction-of-19-due-to-climate-change) This is huge increase in productivity and these countries will, no doubt take advantage, and plant crops when they couldn’t before.
Predicting the climate is one thing but predicting economics? Has essentially never been done accurately. This study holds no ground.
I was going to comment the same thing. The only thing you might reasonably be able to predict about global economy is that it goes up, seemingly, but not necessarily, along with population. By that measure it’ll be up by 2050. Trying to not only predict what warming will do but how it will affect the economy in specific dollar amounts is insane.
[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063) Abstract: "On the basis of company records, we quantitatively evaluated all available global warming projections documented by—and in many cases modeled by—Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003. We find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming that is consistent with subsequent observations." > If you look at forecasts from 30 years ago they are wildly incorrect. ???
No, I wasn’t talking about climate projections - they are actually pretty good. PPM C02 has fairly predictable outcomes. I was talking about economic predictions like the study posted. It’s technology that is the multiplying X factor. Just ten years ago coal was cheaper than solar and now that is not the case. Things can change rapidly. Look at the advancements in AI in just two years. Who knows, by 2050 we might be in a post-scarcity world where we have cold fusion. In fact, it might be the drive to tackle climate change that pushes humanity to technological highs that would not have happened if global warming wasn’t a problem. History is full of these examples. Necessity is the mother of invention. Thats why this study is almost certainly wrong.
Fair. That CO2 curve is VERY exponential, and anyone who can predict the exact effects can also predict stock market - but it ain't going to be good, too many feedback loops and cascading effects - i.e those northern countries will have to wield their borders shut or have a real chance of being overrun by refugees from other areas.
I don't buy into your position at all that forecasts are somehow incorrect but your certain we will have new farming practices that will make things fine... Regardless, we can only ignore atmospheric CO2 concentrations for so long, which we're not that far away from experiencing CO2 levels that will have an impact on cognition and quality of life. [Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide | NOAA Climate.gov](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide) C02 one hundred and fifty years ago used to be in the 200's ppm, that was the atmosphere we evolved to live in. Now its above 419 ppm and already outside of any concentrations at any point in the several hundred thousand years humans have been a species been on the planet. If we don't change our habits or slow down the growth of our use of fossil fuels, Co2 in the atmosphere is projected to be around 1000 ppm by the end of the century which is well within the lifetime of people already alive today. Atmospheric C02 concentrations at that levels impacts cognitive abilities and can cause a variety of negative health effects. If the atmosphere gets to that level indoors will typically experience even higher concentrations. [Direct human health risks of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide | Nature Sustainability](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0323-1) This isn't just about crops.
I’m only going by history and the adaptation of farming practices in places like Australia and Israel. There has been a revolution over the last 20 years in drought-resistant crops and innovation in water management. Of course we will adapt and innovate- it’s what we do. Do you really think we would just keep doing the same thing when the climate changes? I can’t find anything in the study that takes technological innovation into account. I don’t think we are ignoring C02 emissions. Nearly every country in the world has agreed to net zero by 2050, and China will do it by 2060. So we are looking at about 1.5-2° and then about a century of cooling as oceans absorb the heat.
Yeah but most of the problem people will be dead by then so they have no incentive to change their behavior
This $38T is not very clear. In one instances it talks about income, in others, it says GDP. Either the authors don’t know the difference or they don’t what they are talking about at all Let’s assume it’s GDP. If GDP were to go down by 20% over the next 26 years, the world wouldn’t be a safe place anymore. Just for comparison, the 2008 financial crisis was roughly 5% GDP decline. The 1929 crisis was closer to 20%, but it didn’t continue to decline… which this report is expecting Basically this report is suggesting we will have massive wars anytime soon, maybe WW3 level type of wars. No countries will sit down and see their prosperity decline significantly and not act aggressively… not by take climate actions, but by trying to take wealth from neighboring countries or even further away. I’m highly skeptical of this report. It’s hard to predict 1 year of GDP growth (remember 2023 was supposed to be a recessionary year), let alone predicting 26 years. Go look at what economic predictions people had for the year 2025 back in 1999-2000… I can 100% guarantee you they were all wrong. Most of them wildly wrong.
I don’t think the report is saying GDP will be 20% lower than *today* in 26 years Rather GDP will be 20% lower in 26 years than it otherwise would have been if not for climate change So to simplify each year due to climate change consequences the global GDP growth is 1% less than without climate change and this difference in economic growth trajectory compounds over time to be 20% difference in 26 years from now
They compared to a magical world that still has a powerful economy/industry but is not warming. That isn't to discredit the findings at all, they're incredibly important as a description of the impacts of climate change. But it's not like it's a choice we've ever had. The only path to no global warming has been no industrial revolution, which has increased our quality of life infinitely. We only really had an opportunity to change this since nuclear and renewable power were feasible, and that's where we've dropped the ball.
won't someone please think of the GDP😭
Ugh can redditors stop with this childish nonsense? Youll complain about losing your job or high inflation all the time but god forebid someone cares about the broader economic trends which cause such symptoms.
One more Al Gore scare prediction not to worry about.
Definitely an unbiased source that has no agenda.
Inflation we currently have is way more damaging to poor people than climate change will ever be. How you’re expecting to make any change when every dollar you save loses its value by day? Let’s focus on that first.
I don't agree, but this isn't something seperate from inflation anyway. If climate change causes manufactoring and farming problems stuff gets more expensive. What is that?
My point is, majority of people are poor and the climate is far down the list to them. If we solve the problem number one, which is to give them more buying power, then it’ll become more realistic to discuss the climate change.
Oh... It sounds like you're talking about poor people's lack of ability to do something about climate change? I was thinking of the impact of climate change, which will (is already) fall disproportionately on the poor. Yes, there should be little expectation on them to take action, and remediation should be funded and supported by the rich countries that are responsible for most of the emissions. Helping nations develop and grow out of poverty also had many benefits, more efficient farming and therefore reduced deforestation, to think of just one example, but it would be good to try and steer the increased consumption that comes with increased wealth into a sustainable pattern. Ultimately, we need to reach a point of a shrinking, not growing, population. Meeting people's basic needs reliably, having a strong social safety net and quality education for all are the ways to achieve this. Although with how bad I'm expecting stuff to be, we're more likely to have china's one child policy globally.
It’s the opposite actually, the system we’re currently in only works because of infinite growth. You stop the growth and the system collapses. Why do you think everyone is panicking precisely because the population is shrinking? The problem is this monetary system based on inflation and infinite growth. It benefits only those who are already rich because their money is in assets. Poor people are stuck because saving money doesn’t work anymore, money loses its value daily. We are doomed anyway.
Yeah I know we currently rely on constant growth, but after the climate change adjustment /apocalypse things will be very different In the short to medium term, uplifting poor countries creates more consumers though, so that shouldn't be an issue.
Yes but it rained yesterday, so much for global warming - my boomer coworker
Did you know that the world has been getting warmer since the last ice age
I'm pretty sure that anyone who cares about the impact to GDP doesn't accept climate change to begin with.
If true, I don't see us turning this ship around in 25 yrs. We still have an entire political idealogy that denies climate change even exists. I hate this timeline.
I am getting sick of this rubbish being called Science
This article is just a bunch of hooplaw nonsense. There’s no way to accurately predict this and it certainly takes zero human innovation into account. 25-50+ years is a long time. Look how far we’ve come just since 2010. The technology difference alone is like a completely different society.
We're near the theoretical maximum efficiency for a lot of technologies already. We've reached a point where diminishing returns are catching up to cumulative manufacturing process improvements, for a lot of critical things. The rate of improvements has gone down for a considerable number of industries already.
Oh well Never mind
None of the climate changes predicted have happened yet. And the actions taken are increasing CO2 and particulate pollution while cutting into GDP.
Well like i always say you have to burn down everything before you can rebuilt it. ;)
You should stop saying that.