There are no doubt plenty of economists out there but the question is whether there are any brave enough to enter this ring.
Cost benefit analysis (CBA), the economist's tool of choice, requires two inputs - cash flows and a discount factor, or if you're really clever, multiple discount factors. Estimating these values is subject to increasing error the further out in time they are expected to arise, errors which are largely neutralised by the discount factor if you go out far enough. But additionally, and crucially for our Roman, they assume 'all other things being equal'. These 'other things' include an uncountable array of factors from the geopolitical to the geological and much besides. These 'other things' are ignored by CBA because they are inherently unknowable - what impact will future innovation have; what impact will the shift of economic and political power from West to East have after say 100 years; what other geopolitical changes will occur that we haven't yet discerned? The list is endless. It seems to follow from that, and bearing in mind Jim's remarks about their being multiple climate equilibria compatible with any set of climate variables, that any attempt to forecast/predict/project social futures beyond a couple of generations is inescapably more in the realms of futurology than it is in any science that attempts to make rational links between cause and effect. An argument that says that if we do A then B will most likely happen is very different from one that says if we do A then any one of B to Z might happen and we don't really know which it will be. This suggests that framing this debate in terms of outcomes merely creates insurmountable difficulties since a) we most probably don't have reliable knowledge of the values of the relevant variables, and b) even if we did, we wouldn't know which of the multiple equilibrium states (physical or social) would emerge from them. We have to find more coherent and less contentious reasons for responding to climate change than how it might affect people in the future. We also need to remember, if I may return to my skeptic who started this thread off (see Non-linearity of climate sensitivity), there are plenty of people out there for whom the basic science is still far from settled. For example, have a look at http://mises.org/daily/5892/The-Skeptics-Case from my skeptic's latest missive to me. I am not competent to comment on the climate science in this (orthodox climate science has got the effects of CO2 right but completely misunderstood and misrepresented the feedbacks which largely offset the potential warming) but the mainstream climate science community clearly has some formidable challengers even ignoring all the nutters and conspiracy theorists. When you combine the complexity of the intergenerational with that of the climate science, is it any wonder that the majority of the world's politicians have the freedom to respond to climate change as a classic problem of international relations in which the prime and almost only significant determining factor is relative power and the economic issues are very short term? It is widely acknowledged that anthropogenic climate change is unprecedented and for this reason we should not be surprised that our international political institutions are not fit for purpose. We seem to be playing out what might be called the Tragedy of the Uncommon, which like its PD cousin, can only be resolved by multiple iterations. That implies some mistakes along the way. Let's hope they're not too serious. Robert On Feb 26, 6:13 pm, James Fleming <[email protected]> wrote: > Regarding estimation of economic growth rates on millennial time > scales, what economy or currency has persisted in continuous form for > 1000 years? Take a look, for example at the ancient (500 yr old) > Russian ruble. Much more recently, the secured bond holders of GM > were quite surprised in 2009, for example. These are not millennial > timescales. Any economists out there? > > Jim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
