Hi. Thinking about it, I probably overstated a bit about Nordhaus’ acceptance. Instead of saying “basically no one in fields related to sustainability research” I think “many do not” is probably more accurate. I’m in my bubble and there may be very different bubbles around. And I guess a bad model is better than no model, as one can improve it instead of starting from scratch.
About what you ask for:
(a) I’m not sure. Steve Keen (@ProfSteveKeen in Twitter) is very vocal about how bad Nordhause’s model is, maybe he’s got something. But (rightly) pointing that something is wrong is much easier than building something better, so I’m not sure if he’s got anything. I know he was working on one (several?) paper(s) with Tim Garrett. But Tim is physicist, so it may be something beyond GDP (Tim has a model showing that CO2 emissions energy demand correlates very well with historically cumulative GDP somehow implying that we are actually not decoupling from resource needs).
In general, the problem is that any meaningful CC will have knock-on effects that are ultimately impossible to predict. One can put numbers on those, but then for each ΔTemp there have to be at least different scenarios (only ΔTemp, plus X damage from more extreme environmental phenomena, plus Y effect of war, plus Z from migrations, combinations, degrees...). And on top of that, there are unknown unknowns (e.g. last summer hat heatwaves that melted infrastructure in some parts of the US [I think], which AFAIK basically no one had predicted).
(b) and (c)… maybe the people in the SCER and in the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute? These folks study knock-on effects that CC could produce. Beard from SCER spoke about it in the FLI podcast and I think Luke Kempt also has worked on related topics. I’m less familiar with the people in GCRI. But in general, these all look at overwhelmingly-negative scenarios (CC triggering a nuclear war and so on), so it sounds like what you want.
Hi. Thinking about it, I probably overstated a bit about Nordhaus’ acceptance. Instead of saying “basically no one in fields related to sustainability research” I think “many do not” is probably more accurate. I’m in my bubble and there may be very different bubbles around. And I guess a bad model is better than no model, as one can improve it instead of starting from scratch.
About what you ask for:
(a) I’m not sure. Steve Keen (@ProfSteveKeen in Twitter) is very vocal about how bad Nordhause’s model is, maybe he’s got something. But (rightly) pointing that something is wrong is much easier than building something better, so I’m not sure if he’s got anything. I know he was working on one (several?) paper(s) with Tim Garrett. But Tim is physicist, so it may be something beyond GDP (Tim has a model showing that
CO2 emissionsenergy demand correlates very well with historically cumulative GDP somehow implying that we are actually not decoupling from resource needs).In general, the problem is that any meaningful CC will have knock-on effects that are ultimately impossible to predict. One can put numbers on those, but then for each ΔTemp there have to be at least different scenarios (only ΔTemp, plus X damage from more extreme environmental phenomena, plus Y effect of war, plus Z from migrations, combinations, degrees...). And on top of that, there are unknown unknowns (e.g. last summer hat heatwaves that melted infrastructure in some parts of the US [I think], which AFAIK basically no one had predicted).
(b) and (c)… maybe the people in the SCER and in the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute? These folks study knock-on effects that CC could produce. Beard from SCER spoke about it in the FLI podcast and I think Luke Kempt also has worked on related topics. I’m less familiar with the people in GCRI. But in general, these all look at overwhelmingly-negative scenarios (CC triggering a nuclear war and so on), so it sounds like what you want.
I hope this helps.
I haven’t really read it, but the title made me think you may (still) be interested: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/08/revising-the-cost-of-climate-change/