Eighteen Quadrillion Dollars
$1.8 x 10^16 is quite a few. Enough to, say, give everybody in the world a million dollars and still have enough left to build a palace the size of France, with enough more to buy every Republican politician, and still be able to afford to stock your palace with a trophy wife for every day of the century. I think there would still be enough cash to build a particle accelerator around the circumference of the Earth.
It's also the projected cost of controlling carbon emissions until 2100, according to this article cited by Lubos Motl, which in turn was linked by Lubos in a recent comment to me.
Let's neglect for a moment a small matter of a factor of a thousand - some of us may recall how Lumo feels about errors of this sort in climate debate. How can someone come up with a number like that? The answer is that you assume an exponential rate of growth of the Net World Product (NWP), come up with some percentage by which you expect emissions controls to decrement that rate, and take the difference over 100 years of those two conjectural numbers.
If I could buy into this methodology, then I might find Bjorn Lomborg's reasoning more persuasive. Economics has existed for two and a half centuries, and that whole period has been characterized by essentially exponential economic growth. Economists tend to regard this as a law of the universe, but a longer view, and many more fundamental considerations, suggest that exponential growth always terminates, and often rather badly, as in the Maya, Anazazi, and Easter Island cultures.
Catastrophists, like myself, aren't worried about the minor effects of environmental degradation, or even the extinction of the polar bears, but about catastrophic breakdown of the ecosystem. More rapid growth, in the absence of the ability to control population and other environmental impacts, just means we get to the apocalypse faster. More immediately, it seems possible that we may start running low on oil before we loose the worst genies of global warming - or not.
It's also the projected cost of controlling carbon emissions until 2100, according to this article cited by Lubos Motl, which in turn was linked by Lubos in a recent comment to me.
Let's neglect for a moment a small matter of a factor of a thousand - some of us may recall how Lumo feels about errors of this sort in climate debate. How can someone come up with a number like that? The answer is that you assume an exponential rate of growth of the Net World Product (NWP), come up with some percentage by which you expect emissions controls to decrement that rate, and take the difference over 100 years of those two conjectural numbers.
If I could buy into this methodology, then I might find Bjorn Lomborg's reasoning more persuasive. Economics has existed for two and a half centuries, and that whole period has been characterized by essentially exponential economic growth. Economists tend to regard this as a law of the universe, but a longer view, and many more fundamental considerations, suggest that exponential growth always terminates, and often rather badly, as in the Maya, Anazazi, and Easter Island cultures.
Catastrophists, like myself, aren't worried about the minor effects of environmental degradation, or even the extinction of the polar bears, but about catastrophic breakdown of the ecosystem. More rapid growth, in the absence of the ability to control population and other environmental impacts, just means we get to the apocalypse faster. More immediately, it seems possible that we may start running low on oil before we loose the worst genies of global warming - or not.
my mom said thats wrong
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