Science Focus
original post »If you read some of the projections about what could happen if carbon emissions are allowed to continue unabated, they sound pretty grim: a meter of sea level rise, average temperatures in some regions rising by 9 degrees Celsius, and changes continuing on into the next century. But if you look at most economic analyses of climate change, the costs don't seem to really reflect those sorts of changes.
A new paper in Nature Climate Change explains why that's the case, and it tries to suggest alternative ways of looking at the challenges. The study shows that, if the right corrections are applied to these models, then the cost of carbon set by the US government may be off by as much as a factor of 10.
The impacts of future climate change are usually estimated using what are called integrated assessment models. In these models, temperature changes have an immediate impact on economic activity, accounting for things like lost crops, increased demand for cooling, and the cost of infrastructure improvements. These models, however, assume there's no permanent damage to the GDP; worker productivity and capital available for investments remains just as it was before any climate upset, as does what economists term the total factor productivity. In fact, one of the leading integrated assessment models simply allows labor and total factor productivity to be specified separately from anything that happens within the economy, while capital availability is only influenced by investment decisions made within the model.
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» see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/RMg3IQ5gvBk/
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