I wish every moron who sees himself as seperate from nature the ability to become extinct first, if they are so eager to destroy everyone's only life raft.

"Extinction is a part of nature!" Ok, you first then, asshole.

Do right-wingers think environmentalists don't know nature can be fucked up? We know better than anyone, that's why we know that we need to be careful what we mess with or we're fucked

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[–] Philosoraptor@hexbear.net 13 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I should probably track down this anecdote, but I read that a Nobel-prizewinning economist once dismissed the impact of climate change on agriculture because it only contributes 5% to the US GDP.

That would be William Nordhaus and his DICE model.

[–] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

LMAO, just watched a Second Thought video on how GDP is pure ass.

Every time ol’ porkchop raises rent solely because he can or all the arbitrary prices on a medical bill, that raises GDP.

Fuck Ayn Rand for coining the term “objectivist” because leftists seem to be the only ideology concerned with the physical and would put our physical world over a concept like an economy (and people have really only discussed ‘the economy’ for about 100 years).

[–] Philosoraptor@hexbear.net 5 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

One of the wilder parts of this is that Nordhaus was actually one of the better people on this for a long time, and remains better than a lot of his colleagues. The DICE model at least attempts to incorporate what are called "non-market impacts" into its estimate of the cost associated with climate change--it tries to factor in things like impacts on human health, longevity, and other """"intangibles""" that don't directly contribute to GDP, as well as factor in impacts associated with systemic changes and low-probability/high-impact events. Many other integrated assessment models, especially the early ones, didn't even try. Here's a comparison of a few of the leading model projections (including Nordhaus) for economic impacts associated with climate change from The Stern Review:

Even his worst case scenario is laughably optimistic, but it does at least try to account for some stuff the other models don't, and thus at least gives a slightly more sane estimate of damage. It still doesn't account for so-called "socially contingent impacts" (things like mass migration, war, the rise of far-right governments, and similar things that can happen as a result of environmental destruction), nor does it reach into events that are both low-probability/high-impact AND non-market. This isn't a defense of Nordhaus, but rather an indictment of how bad other economists working in this space have been. I'm about to give a final on this stuff in about, oh, half an hour.