Cost of global warming over the next 40 years = $7 trillion?

Question

A review commissioned by the British government, compiled by Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, has estimated that the cost of unmitigated climate change could be as much as $7 trillion in the next 40 years. That's about 20% of all the money in the world.

The extremely scary piece of information is accompanied by a polite suggestion that we spend 1% of the world's money right now, in order to avoid that fate. "We can pay one percent more now," Stern explained, "We can grow and be green."

http://green.yahoo.com/index.php?q=news/208

Isn't the mere prospect of a $7 trillion cost worth doing things like reducing our dependency on oil and becoming more energy efficient?

Answer 1

You forget that $7T number is almost a year old now. It is higher. And that isn't the cost of DOING something ... that is the cost of NOT doing something. That is the cost of crop loses, interrupted flights, and roads and railways buckling under extreme heat. It is the cost of England being flooded and Europe being in a drought.

The immediate savings people will see by conserving is totally unrelated to that number and will have no immediate effect on it.

I.e. not only are you going to pay 20% more for your food and gas due to Global Warming, but you could save yourself money and mitigate the circumstances causing those costs through conservation. But you will not live to see "reduced Global Warming". It has already happened and will continue for generations.

Answer 2

"Global warming may cost $7 trillion next decade" Saddam MAY have WMD >>Therefore, we should invade. I love how science has evolved into things that MAY happen, as opposed to verifiable repeatable experimentation. I just love it. If this world would have reacted to every doomsday environmental prediction over the last 40 years, the planet would be bankrupt by now. But this time it is serious. All those other times, it was just people running their mouths. Enjoy your paranoia. .

Answer 3

$7 trillion is 20% of the money in the world? Get real. Gross world product was over $48 trillion last year. And this in no way reflects accumulated wealth, which is incredibly larger. Over 40 years, disregarding increased production and inflation which we full well KNOW will happen, $7 trillion amounts to 0.36% of the NEW wealth generated.

But, hey, $7 trillion is $7 trillion. What do we have to do to avoid this? Taxing carbon at it's current rate of production will cost CONSERVATIVELY $1 trillion per year. There's no need to do the math - over 40 years it WILL DEFINITELY cost us FAR more than the ESTIMATED damage that may not even take place.

Answer 4

What guarantee do we have that will solve the problem?

We could find ourselves in that worst of all worlds where we have spent a great deal of money to avoid the problems of Global Warming merely to find that we are still facing the problems of Global Warming and we still must spend a great deal more money to mitigate the problems of Global Warming.

Yes, Global Warming will cost us a great deal of money.

However trying to avoid the problems of Global Warming will also cost us a great deal of money and the money that we spend and the damage that we do to the economy may not even solve the problem.

Edit to JJ:

We are not talking about 1%, we are talking about far more than that, and causing a depression far worse than the great depression of the 1930's, far more poverty and misery and still not solving the problem.

Remember, if we are to have any chance of avoiding the problems associated with Global Warming we will have to reduce world wide carbon dioxide emissions to less than one tenth of what they are today.

How many hundreds of trillions of dollars do you think that will cost?

Even that may not be sufficient to avoid the problems of Global Warming.

After that we will still have to spend trillions of dollars more to mitigate the problems of Global Warming.

After we have destroyed the world's economies where do you think that we will get the money to pay for that?

If we cannot guarantee that we will solve the problem of Global Warming after spending trillions of dollars it is much wiser to save that money a use it to mitigate the problems of Global Warming.

We have the money to either stop and prevent Global Warming or mitigate the effects of Global Warming, but we do not have the money to do both.

Answer 5

God no. What do they base their information on? Is it just a good guess?

How soon we forget the predictions of the Y2K bug. There too were the predictions that this "bug" was going to clean out the stock market and all the money in the banks. There were cries to "do something" as doing nothing could cost us dearly......

These false warnings sound no different than used snake oil.

Answer 6

Well first his report was highly criticised and then he resigned shortly thereafter.

Such figures are pure supposition and do not have any real basis in fact. Quoting such figures without any credible basis puts people of believing in global warming. As do green taxes that merely give the government more of our money and do absolutely nothing else.

The only way people will begin to believe in and act against global warming is to keep the doom mongers and ecowarrirors in control and let the scientists and good scientific research come out.

The current bandwagon is driving people to ignore it!

Answer 7

My question when this came out were - what assumptions were made in developing this estimate? This has never been answered. I need to know this before I can even begin to decide what this study actually means.

Answer 8

All I see from most of these answers, is "boo hoo what happens if we spend that 1% and it don't work?"
what kind of logic is that?!
There is a choice to made people. It is either spend the 1% and take the chance that it may not work, or don't spend the 1% and be guaranteed that it won't.

Answer 9

You're right about the report being scary.....that's the whole point. The report is a deliberate scare tactic to prepare people for huge spending on "solutions" that don't solve anything.

Answer 10

So if it weren't for the Iraq war we could afford global warming? Thanks, Bush!