| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| April 23rd, 2024 | 3:05pm-4:05pm | Carriage House |
Perspectives on warming Earth: A near miss andthe ultimate cost
Abstract: Iwill present two bookended ruminations on anthropogenic climate change, onelooking backward into the past, the other about the future. The firstsegment considers the question of what would have happened if the natural CO2concentration in the atmosphere had been different than it turned out tobe. If it had been lower, the radiative forcing from fossil fuel CO2would have started impacting the weather sooner, which would have left lesstime for the technological development needed for decarbonization. We gotlucky! The second segment is on how we assess future damages from climatechange. The present-day value of future climate damages is called thesocial cost of carbon, and is based on the idea of discounting, to account forperpetual exponential growth and human selfishness. What if the discountrate were zero? We come up with a scale estimate of costs in present-dayterms by integrating a fractional change in Earth’s human carrying capacitythrough time, multiplied by the present-day rate of global economicactivity. In order to get this published, we had to figure out in whatmythical world this calculation would be actually correct, which turns out tobe an extrusion of today into the indefinite future, with no growth or technologicaldevelopment, and everyone living forever, like Groundhog day. Because carbon release alters climate for hundreds of thousands of years, the“ultimate” cost of carbon exceeds the “social” cost of carbon by many orders ofmagnitude.
Sign up for a meeting (Apr 23 or 24) or lunch (Apr23) with David Archer. Students and postdocs are especially invited.
For questions, or to nominate future speakers in theseries, e-mailfowlerseminarseries@whoi.edu
To attend by Zoomregistration is required.