Across the world, public finances are stretched dangerously thin. Per-person growth continues dropping while costs are climbing for pensions, education, health care and defense.
These urgent priorities could easily require an additional 3%-6% of GDP. Yet green campaigners are loudly calling for governments to spend up to 25% of our GDP, choking growth in the name of climate change.
If climate Armageddon were imminent, they would have a point. The truth is far more prosaic.
Two major new scientific estimates of the total global cost of climate change have been published recently.
These are not individual studies, which can vary greatly (with the costliest studies getting copious press coverage). Instead, they are meta-studies based on the entirety of the peer-reviewed literature.
One is authored by one of the most cited climate economists, Richard Tol; the other is by the only climate economist to win the Nobel prize, William Nordhaus.
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The studies suggest that a 3 degree Celsius temperature increase by the end of the century — slightly pessimistic based on current trends — will have a global cost equivalent to between 1.9% and 3.1% of global GDP.
To put this into context, the United Nations estimates that by the end of the century, the average person will be 450% as rich as he or she is today. Because of climate change, they will feel “only” 435%-440% as rich as today.
Why is this so different from the impression we have been given by the media?
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Alarmist campaigners and credulous journalists fail to account for the simple fact that people are remarkably adaptable and tackle most climate problems at low cost.
Take food: Climate campaigners warn we’ll starve, but research shows that instead of a 51% increase in food availability by 2100 if there were no climate change, we are on-track for “only” a 49% increase.
Or weather disasters: They killed half a million people annually in the 1920s, whereas the last decade saw fewer than 9,000 fatalities each year.
The 97.5% reduction in mortality is because people are more resilient, because they’re richer and can access better technology.
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