Read this piece and let me reprint some quotes;
"The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade."
another quote
"At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually."
"Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. "
"Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. "
"The most exciting research on the economics of warming has also come from Hsiang and his colleagues, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: Every degree Celsius of warming costs, on average, 1.2 percent of GDP (an enormous number, considering we count growth in the low single digits as “strong”). This is the sterling work in the field, and their median projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century (resulting from changes in agriculture, crime, storms, energy, mortality, and labor).
Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier: There is a 12 percent chance that climate change will reduce global output by more than 50 percent by 2100, they say, and a 51 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 20 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. "
So, my dear Readers notice how Climate economics is now reaching out to the popular audience and our UC Berkeley colleagues' estimates are treated as "laws of physics". Please read my recent blog post on why I have a problem with this.
For those looking for an alternative view of our future, please read my Climatopolis logic.
For those who want to see why the Hsiang et. al. logic breaks down, please read this microeconomics based paper.
For those who wonder whether widespread air conditioning adoption will significantly raise global GHG emissions read this (2015 PNAS paper and see Table 1).
Davis and Gertler (2015) write;
"Whether or not these forecasts will prove accurate depends on
the pace of technological change. There have been dramatic
improvements in energy efficiency over the last several decades,
in part due to induced innovation (28), and as the market for air
conditioning grows this will increase incentives for firms to innovate
(29). Continued advances in energy efficiency or the development
of new cooling technologies could reduce the energy consumption
impacts considerably."
So, competition between geographic areas and endogenous technological change will together determine whether our future cities adapt to this challenge. The author views us as passive victims in the face of this emerging (and well publicized) threat. I disagree.