Climate Change is Real

Well, we all know that there's no-one so good at predicting the future as economists. Nothing ever takes them by surprise. Not according to this guy.However, it doesn't really matter. Papers like this serve their purpose by existing, they don't actually have to contain good math or (in this case) any physics whatsoever.

At the very least, that should be an "or" and not an "and", since obviously the money is to be spent on replacing the energy infrastructure. You give as an example Germany's Energiewende. The reason it costs so much is because their plan does not involve just turning off all their carbon-emitting power plants and returning to the Middle Ages. They could do that for free. What would be the capital cost of meeting our increasing energy needs by an expansion of the present infrastructure?What about running costs? I seem to remember that after one has made a capital investment in a coal-fired power plant, it is necessary to keep buying coal to put in it. Sunlight is comparatively cheap.Googling around, I see that the Energiewende is supposed to save more money annually than it costs by 2020. I'll post a link if I can find out the basis for the calculation; at the moment I don't know if it's actually true, but the running costs are definitely something you'd have to take into account, you can't just look at capital costs to see if it makes economic sense. If people did that, our economy would still be based on subsistence agriculture, and this message would be incised on birch bark with a sharp piece of flint and brought to you by carrier pigeon.

Well, it displays a stunning lack of relevance. What it seems to show is that if you leave the climate to itself, rises in temperature (due to Milankovitch cycles or whatever) drive increases in CO₂. This does not answer, and cannot answer, the question of what happens if you artificially increase CO₂. 'Cos of that being a different question.It's like trying to argue that you can't kill someone by burying them alive by observing that in the normal course of events people die first and then are buried as a result of being dead. This is fortunately true, but it does not and cannot answer the question of what would happen if you did bury someone alive, for which we would need reference either to fundamental principles or to a totally different set of statistics.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.