If you could solve climate change for less than that, I think it would be splendid.

To put that number in context, which is just an order of magnitude, it's $5,000 for every person on Earth, about 1.5x the current US national debt, and just under the combined market cap of NYSE+NASDAQ.

As an existential problem for humanity that doesn't currently have a solution, I think that's a decent cost estimate.

This rhetoric of new nuclear is gonna solve the climate crises reminds of how GMO was poised to increase our food safety and end world hunger.

It didn’t. And since I’ve learned that new technology doesn’t save us when there is an underlying social issue that is causing it. With GMO the issue is food distribution. In the climate disaster the cause is a little more complex but undeniably a few actors are making an unfair amount of money while polluting the climate for the rest of us.

I find more hope in solutions like carbon tax, international agreements, greener infrastructure, and general climate justice, then for an unproven magical technology that will be deployed on top of the existing social problems.

Never underestimate the tendency of the rich to shift the cost to others while keeping the profit. New nuclear is not going to change that.

You ever notice that the countries where the people are pissed off at the rich for taking too much, pissed of at the government and pissed off about climate change are all countries where basically everyone is fed, clothed and has running water and stable electric power?

Advancements in technology (including GMO crops) and productivity in general have massively raised standards of living in the developing world.

Raised standards of living are what permit people to give a crap about things like oppressed people in the next village over and climate change. Reducing the cost of commodities, like energy and grain, by any means raises standards of living, especially at the margins, and is what permits more people to care about abstract things.

I’m not sure anything you say here is true:

* I really doubt GMO has raised the standard of living for the average person.

* I really doubt people in less then stable economy have any less salt towards the rich, the government, or polluters.

* I really doubt there is a correlation between the standard of living caring about your neighbors.

So to answer your question. No. I have never noticed that countries where people are pissed at the rich are the people that live in stable economy. To prove you wrong, take a look at Greta Thunberg’s twitter feed. She is constantly retweeting people from poorer countries being pissed at the rich for ruining our climate.

>I really doubt GMO has raised the standard of living for the average person.

Then you are absolutely not paying attention at all whatsoever. In fact, the majority of the impact of GMO crops has been felt in countries where there was literally not enough food to go around. You’re welcome to your organics in a country as food secure as in the west but starving poor and middle income countries is not okay.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4218791/

Thank you for this correction. I guess there are in fact evidence for greater crop yield and more farmer profits with GMO crops.

However this doesn’t really take away from my point that GMO didn’t fix world hunger. Farmers can save money by using less pesticide and have better crop yield all they want but that still doesn’t fix food not going to where it is needed.

This—on its own—doesn’t even take away from my weaker claim that „I doubt GMO has raised the standard of living for the average person“. Sure it has raised the standard of living for the farmers that have the option of swapping to GMO crops that previously needed a lot of pesticide. But unless you believe in some trickle down economic theory that will not automatically raise the standard of living to anyone else.

That all said I do find it a little handy that the quoted study only talks about maize, soy, and cotton. One of these is not even a food crop. And the two food crops here are notorious for giant industrial scale farms where much of the yield isn’t even for human consumption, but turned into feed for the meat industry. See it’s a problem of distribution. The profits of more maize and soy yield grown with less pesticide will most likely stay with the farmer, and even if they reduce the price of their price product, the profit from the cheaper crops will more likely go to the cattle farmer up stream with the cheaper feed. The standard of living for the average person will just remain the same, or—at best—marginally improve.

How do you feel about golden rice?

They have been growing golden rice for over 15 years now. And they have yet to deliver on the promise of providing the lacking nutrients to the people who need them.

I mean sure. If GMO can help people, sure go ahead and grow them. But the fact is that so far GMO crops are limited to large agriculture giants and is not used to help with the global food safety net. Particularly not for feeding the poorer parts of the world.

In addition, dietary vitamin A deficiency can easily be fixed now (as well as 20 years ago; and even 120 years ago) with better food distribution. We have been shipping food for millennia. We don’t need golden rice or any other GMO to fix this problem.

Just to clarify, I’m not against them researching and growing golden rice. I am against them lying about how this crop can save the world from a problem that can be already easily be fixed with existing methods.

This is in no way to disagree with your overall point, but marine cloud brightening looks like it might be a fairly cost-effective solution to climate change. It's unproven, but not an insane gamble either, and it has little risk of second-order consequences if it doesn't work. All that at a cost of single-digit billions per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs

We have many proven solutions to the climate disaster, including, carbon tax, renewable energy, cleaner and more efficient infrastructure, telecommuting, international agreements, etc.

Going after a single unproven solution (yes this includes non-existing types of nuclear energy too) is just magic at this point and it doesn’t work.

I wouldn't say those approaches have turned out to be sufficient by themselves, so far. Why not keep improving them, and try additional measures with some hope of success and little risk?

All of these solutions have been deployed on small scales and are proven to work. However they always stop short of implementing on the scale required for the problem. International agreements in particular worked really well to stop the destruction of the ozone layer. However they have never agreed on enough carbon emission reduction for any significant reduction in climate harm.

All of those reduce emissions but they don't stop them and they don't do anything about the existing already-too-high levels.

We have methods of removing carbon out of the atmosphere. They all have the same thing in common, they require a whole lot of electricity. We have something in our back pockets that can generate a whole lot of electricity without any additional carbon...

It seems to me to make more sense combating the problem at the source. This just seems to add more complexity to the problem. Did anyone else think of Snowpiercer when they saw this?

Not from seeing Snowpiercer, but from everytime I hear some other crazy science scheme. It's like the pharma industry creating ways of dealing with symptoms rather than the cause of the symptoms. It's the ultimate Old Lady Swallowed a Fly.

I think we can look to austrailia for many many many examples where we thought something would work out when we fucked with nature on a large scale without really studying it.

IE. Canetoads.

Climate change his hardly an existential threat for humanity. We survived the last ice age with stone tools, this is a less severe change. Economic impacts from things like rising sea levels really depend on how much we spend on maintaining things as they currently are vs adapting to the new normal.

Aka do you live below sea level, raise the city, or move somewhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

The last ice age occurred gradually over the span of millennia. Anthropic climate change is occurring in an instant by comparison. Not to mention, humanity survived by mass migration, something that's a lot harder for integrated global economies to do. Few believe humanity is going to go extinct. But extinction of industrialized civilization is a more real concern. And the collapse of industrialized civilization will undoubtedly entail the death of over 90% of the human population.

Humans aren’t at risk from climate change, it’s all the other species without our powers of quick adaption.

Even for Humans, some regions of the world will be simply to hot to be continuated habited.

I doubt that because technology is so powerful and adaptable. Dikes can protect lowlands. Air conditioning can make hot summers tolerable. Food can be grown in more northern climes.

But coral can’t adapt to warmer more acidic waters overnight. Polar bears can’t darken their fur in a couple generations to hunt in perpetual summer tundra.

Dikes can also lead to the destruction of swamps or coastal habitat reducing natural ways of capturing the carbon. In some places they can also lead to further land corrosion which counterproductively will only increase flooding. So dikes are no way a silver bullet to protect lowlands from the effects of the climate disaster.

Air conditioning does not protect workers that need to work outdoors, or people that live in areas with limited access to electricity.

And this says nothing of the other effects we still have no way of combating, including forest fires, stronger hurricanes, prolonged droughts, increased pesting of climate tolerant species, mass migration of climate refugees from the worst affected areas, and—eventually—conflicts and even wars arising from this mass migration. There is no technology that can save us from these effects.

Yes the effects of the natural world is indeed devastating. But there is no way the society as we know it can survive these changes. At best I see humanity regressing to another imperial age with constant wars around the planet, massive exploitation of the majority of the human kind, technology only serving to increase this exploitation, frequent famines, no relief after natural disasters (except for the wealthy few). And even this can’t last forever as at some point the mass of humanity will not bear it any longer and we can expect a societal collapse at a scale not seen since the Bronze age collapse of the 12th century BC.

You Malthusians have only been wrong for 300 years, be prepared to be wrong for a few hundred more.

The world is awash in excess capacity.

It is very disingenuous of you to call me a Malthusian. The Malthusian theory sets a cap at population growth and predicts an inevitable scarcity driven famines and conflicts after a certain period of unhindered growth. It says nothing about the effects of real outside changes in the environment.

In fact these worries—and the fact that we are calling for drastic changes to prevent this disaster—is in fact counter to any Malthusian theory. A true Malthusian would state this collapse is inevitable. We state they are certain if we allow the climate disaster to progress unhindered.

The technology you talked about is only available in developed countries. What about the people in parts in Africa who already have problem in terms of food insecurities?

As their economies grow, they will continue to get more tools to solve the problems, unless they are stopped by a massive pandemic of socialist dictators.

An instant in geological time not a literal instant. Death of modern civilization is always a risk, but not directly from climate change.

The global food surplus is projected to continue even in the worst case. Energy and raw material production is similarly not a major concern. People continue to live in Dubai which demonstrate how extreme local conditions can get without forcing exodus. Further, few places are expected to get even that bad.

Yes, changes to weather patterns, sea levels, invasive species, even diseases are likely. But, collapse of civilization is only really a risk if WWIII kicks off.

I like your optimism, people would just live in inhabitable places or relocate and would be welcome, such gentlemen. I expect WWIII.

What specifically is going to cause mass migrations in your mind, and on what time scale? Sea level rise on the order of 5 feet in 80 years is hardly going to make most countries uninhabitable. Over longer time scales will see much larger increases, but the yearly change is never projected to be that rapid.

Water availability is a concern for farming and industry, but not really people. Desalination is cheap enough for personal use even in India. Every 10 gallons a day is an extra ~4$ per year. Projecting US use age on global poor is unaffordable, but the global poor don’t use nearly that much water.

As armchair academic I kind of understand you. People live in all sort of horrible conditions today - famine, malaria, diseases. As living person I ask myself what if my home was destroyed by flood? What if there is no water to grow food? What if person from the country which caused most of CO2 emissions [1] expects me to be contempt? Shouldn't I blow them up? Maybe all I need to commit is a good preacher.

Last mass migration caused by ISIS. COVID caused reduced oil consumption is enough to make a trouble for oil exporters. Global warming is worse - drought, flood, fires. World is extremely fragile, resources supplied from another part of the world, even today cobalt mining is horrible, what would be then? I've heard of another civilization and broken supply chains [2].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#cumulative-co2-emis...

[2] 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4

Supply disruptions occur with every war or crisis yet modern economies are extremely resilient. The trap is thinking the economy needs exactly what it’s getting rather than it being the result of a giant optimization problem on available resources. Just look at the US GDP drop from Covid vs the percentage of people staying home.

I also think that you are assigning agency to the general public in ways that are unlikely to hold up. Clearly groups could whip up hatred over global warming, but they can do that over just about anything. The root cause is almost never as important as the people guiding things and the goals being pushed.

As to [1] what’s interesting to me is the US emissions are currently about 1/2 of China’s and dropping fairly quickly while China’s are still expanding rapidly. Dropping US emissions will continue to help, but it’s currently less important than slowing how fast China’s increase. And thus someone aims the mob at a slightly different target.

There's a very real risk that climate change could knock us back globally to a pre-agricultural level. If that happens, there's almost certainly no coming back: the only way we know how to get to our current level of civilization is by extracting substantially all the easily-extractable energy from the Earth's crust. We only get to do that once. This, today, could well be as good as it ever gets, for the only tree of life that we know for sure exists in the universe.

Surface level coal deposits are available across much of the globe, but let’s ignore that.

Agriculture can go a long way with animals, wood, and stone. Extracting energy from wind and rivers is easily attainable from that basis. At which point we would have serious energy to work with. Hydro electric dams provide 6.1% of the total U.S. electricity. That is plenty of energy to kick start industrial manufacturing and get to wide spread solar power.

The next civilization may be extracting most of it’s materials from our cities, but that’s an advantage if anything.

People fleeing the climate alone could collapse the global food chain. I personally thing we're a little too interconnected in the name of efficiency.

Burning all accessible fossil fuels would cause an increase in CO2 similar to that at the end-Triassic mass extinction.

The human race will almost surely survive. Whether our current civilization survives is much less sure.

I can't think of a specific paper/s off hand but having been at labs where they do climate modeling and going to every talk I could I've heard estimates of tens of trillions to hundreds. So the ballpark at least passes my sniff test, though I know that this isn't a hard source. It is also difficult to estimate the damages and costs of climate change which is part of why costs vary so widely. (e.g. do you include events like Katrina?)

Just because someone modeled isn’t particularly compelling. Peer review, meta studies, and testable predictions are critical.

Million acre forest fires are expensive to deal with. Likewise, drought, relocating billions of people displaced by sea level increase. Might be an under-estimate.