since economists argue over the relative value of mitigation (at least beyond low hanging fruit) and present consumption
Do you have any particular sources in mind for this? My understanding is that economists are in strong agreement that action now is much cheaper than action in future.
Re: 1. I think it’s useful to consider concrete examples from history which have killed a large number of people. As per my writeup, in the 20th century, the largest famines killed 10-20M people/decade, so 1-2M people/year, all of which happened when the world had fewer than 4 billion people [source]. So if you think that 1-2M people is implausible, then you’re saying that climate change isn’t likely to cause the same kind of agricultural issues as we’ve previously faced, without serious climate issues.
I was thinking e.g. of Nordhaus’s result that a modest amount of mitigation is optimal. He’s often criticized for his assumptions about discount rate and extreme scenarios, but neither of those is causing the difference in estimates here.
According to your link, recent famines have killed about 1M per decade, so for climate change to kill 1-5M per year through famine, it would have to increase the problem by a factor of 10-50 despite advancing technology and increasing wealth. That seems clearly wrong as a central estimate. The spreadsheet based on the WHO report says 85k-95k additional deaths due to undernutrition, though as you mention, there are limitations to this estimate. (And I guess famine deaths are just a small subset of undernutrition deaths?) Halstead also discusses this issue under “crops”.
Do you have any particular sources in mind for this? My understanding is that economists are in strong agreement that action now is much cheaper than action in future.
Re: 1. I think it’s useful to consider concrete examples from history which have killed a large number of people. As per my writeup, in the 20th century, the largest famines killed 10-20M people/decade, so 1-2M people/year, all of which happened when the world had fewer than 4 billion people [source]. So if you think that 1-2M people is implausible, then you’re saying that climate change isn’t likely to cause the same kind of agricultural issues as we’ve previously faced, without serious climate issues.
I was thinking e.g. of Nordhaus’s result that a modest amount of mitigation is optimal. He’s often criticized for his assumptions about discount rate and extreme scenarios, but neither of those is causing the difference in estimates here.
According to your link, recent famines have killed about 1M per decade, so for climate change to kill 1-5M per year through famine, it would have to increase the problem by a factor of 10-50 despite advancing technology and increasing wealth. That seems clearly wrong as a central estimate. The spreadsheet based on the WHO report says 85k-95k additional deaths due to undernutrition, though as you mention, there are limitations to this estimate. (And I guess famine deaths are just a small subset of undernutrition deaths?) Halstead also discusses this issue under “crops”.