Pirate's Cove

Because the world is on the brink, you know, because if we don’t spend it now we’ll spend it later, you know

When the World Is on the Brink, $3.5 Trillion Is a Pittance
What we don’t spend now to deal with climate change will cost us much more later.

See?

Mr. Lustgarten is an environmental reporter for ProPublica.

This article is copublished with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.

That’s weird, since ProPublica is a vastly Progressive outlet, and is advocating for legislation that is an abuse of power and will lead to more

There will be no bargains with an overheating climate.

The $3.5 trillion price tag that President Biden proposed for his climate-heavy Build Back Better Act might seem enormous. But over the long term, it will be a pittance.

By zeroing in on that number, the public debate seems to have skipped right over the economic ramifications of climate change, which promise to be historically disruptive — and enormously expensive. What we don’t spend now will cost us much more later.

No bargains!

The bills for natural disasters and droughts and power outages are already pouring in. Within a few decades, the total bill will be astronomical, as energy debts surge, global migration swells and industrial upheaval follows. The scale of the threat demands a new way of thinking about spending. Past budgets can no longer guide how governments spend money in the future.

New ways! Which, for Democrats, usually involves taxing and feeing citizens. When do he Dem legislators and activists pushing for this all buy EVs and make their own lives Net Zero?

Some economists and climate scientists have calculated that climate change could cost the United States the equivalent of nearly 4 percent of its gross domestic product a year by 2100. Four percent is likely a conservative estimate; it leaves out consequential costs like damages from drought and climate migration. It assumes the United States and other nations eventually move away from energy generated by oil, coal and natural gas, though not as immediately as many say is needed. In this scenario, the planet will still warm by around three degrees Celsius by the end of the century from preindustrial levels, a change that would be disastrous.

“Could.” That’s another word for “we’re guessing”

The warming climate will worsen virtually every existing service, from water and sewage treatment to mass transit to food distribution to health care, and erode the wealth of millions. Dr. Hsiang, who presented his findings to Congress in 2019, estimates that over the next 80 years intensifying heat alone will reduce Americans’ incomes by $4 trillion to $10.4 trillion as farming becomes more difficult, food prices rise and labor productivity falls. Climate risks are already undercutting the value of real estate in the most vulnerable parts of the country, including the roughly $1.6 trillion worth of private property directly threatened by sea level rise and wildfires.

Doom! Yet, Democrats are spending only a tiny bit of their “infrastructure” bill on this stuff. Weird, eh?

Just as economists have linked hotter temperatures to declining crop yields, they have also linked them to more disease, more crime, more suicides and other effects on people’s health and well-being. All of them result in losses — both social and economic — and threaten the country’s strength and stability.

More doom! Everything is horrible! Anyone else tired of the constant prognostications of doom, especially since Mankind has moved further ahead more than any other period?

Not to invest in these societal defenses today looks like an embrace of chaos and a choice to roll the dice on a period of unpredictable and disruptive change probably greater than anything in human existence.

When the stakes are viewed this way, investing in defending economic stability seems conservative. Failing to respond to the scientific and economic forecasts is what seems dangerously radical.

Tell you what, you Warmists spend your own money. It will make no difference.

Read: $3.5 Trillion Is A Pittance To Do Something About ‘Climate Change’ Or Something »

BTW, this dude totally trolled everyone

https://twitter.com/mrj880/status/1453017745369534469

It’s so damned good, because this is the type of stuff that climate cultist scientists would prognosticate, that everyone got caught up in it. Heck, even Snopes did a fact check on it.

Meanwhile

There’s Still Time to Fix Climate—About 11 Years

On October 31 world leaders will descend on Glasgow, Scotland, for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in a last-ditch effort to defuse the climate emergency by limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Reaching that level would still bring violent storms, deep flooding, gripping droughts and problematic sea-level rise, but it would avert even more severe consequences. Global temperature has risen by nearly 1.1 degrees C since the industrial revolution.

Halloween seems a perfect time, eh?

The first step is to get rid of an old idea that doomsayers still embrace, and that the public and media are not clear on—the notion that even if humans stopped emitting carbon dioxide overnight, inertia in the climate system would continue to raise temperature for many years. Because CO₂ can persist in the atmosphere for a century or more, the argument goes, even if the concentration stopped rising, temperature would keep going up because the heat-trapping mechanism is already in place. In other words, some level of future warming is “baked into” the system, so it’s too late to avoid the 1.5-degree threshold.

But scientists discounted that idea at least a decade ago. Climate models consistently show that “committed” (baked-in) warming does not happen. As soon as CO₂ emissions stop rising, the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ levels off and starts to slowly fall because the oceans, soils and vegetation keep absorbing CO₂, as they always do. Temperature doesn’t rise further. It also doesn’t drop, because atmospheric and ocean interactions adjust and balance out. The net effect is that “temperature does not go up or down,” says Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute—Climate Change and Environment at Imperial College London. The good news is that if nations can cut emissions substantially and quickly, warming can be held to less than 1.5 degrees.

How convenient. If we implement tons of taxes, restrictions, and massive government control over citizens and private entities, things will simply stay the same. I think we’ve seen this happen without all that multiple times, in the form of Pauses. Heck, you had dipping during the 50’s through 70’s.

To avoid that threshold, the world can emit only a set amount of CO₂ from now into the future. This quantity is known as the carbon budget. In 2019, the year before the COVID pandemic depressed the global economy, the world discharged about 42 gigatons of CO₂—similar to the 2018 level and to what is happening in 2021. According to the midrange scenario in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s comprehensive report released in August, “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis,” another 500 gigatons of CO2 emissions will raise global temperature by 1.5 degrees. Nations have about 11 more years at current emissions rates—2032—before exhausting the budget.

Interesting how that timeline always seems to move forward, eh? And the ones giving the other timelines are never held to account, since there is always some sort of Excuse that is supposedly Science, despite them telling us their Science meant doom.

That threshold moves further into the future, however, if countries significantly reduce their output very soon. Aggressive policies, now, can create more time and more hope for preventing catastrophe. In a 2018 report, the IPCC stated that the world had to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 to keep warming to 1.5 degrees. To get on that track, the September U.N. report says, nations have to cut emissions in half by 2030. Every year of delay brings the world much closer to the edge of the precipice. “We are not trying to hit the temperature targets,” says Rogelj, who is also a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and a key author of the 2021 IPCC report. “We are trying to stay as far away from the edge as possible.”

See, we can move the doom threshhold even further out. Just give your money, freedom, and life choices up to government! As told by Elites who are taking lots of private fossil fueled flights to Scotland.

It is also important to understand, Rogelj says, that each added 10th of a degree of warming beyond 1.5 degrees brings greater risk of damaging weather, sea-level rise and other ills to more ecosystems and more people, especially the most vulnerable. He likens the increasing risk to jumping from a platform that today may be a meter high: healthy adults might hit the ground without injury, but small children and the elderly will get hurt. Each additional 10th of a degree raises the platform. “At two meters,” Rogelj says, “many more people are likely to get injured. And at a certain height, everyone will be severely harmed.”

We can stop Bad Weather, you know. I should have added that eye roll back to the emoticons app.

To get there, nations have to jump—now. Some scientists are starting to use the old climate change language to highlight what has to be done. The warming factor that is baked in “is human infrastructure,” Solomon says. If countries let the current stocks of coal plants, natural gas facilities, transportation systems, industrial complexes and buildings live out their natural lifetimes, they commit to a certain amount of additional warming. There is also a lag time in stopping temperature rise, she notes, “a lag in human action—the slow response of people to the problem.” The practical question, says Raymond Pierrehumbert, head of the Planetary Climate Dynamics Group at the University of Oxford, is: How quickly can the world scrub greenhouse gases out of the global economy?

Tell you what: let’s see all the climate cultists make their own lives and businesses Net Zero on their own. See how they do. See if that makes a difference.

Read: Good News: There’s Still 11 Years Left To Save The World From Hotcoldwetdry »