Cost of ignoring the negative effects of climate change will be much higher than paying for them and cleaning?

Question

Cost of ignoring the negative effects of climate change will be much higher than paying for them and cleaning?

Answer 1

Is this a question?  If it is, then the answer is no.

Answer 2

My climate is just fine today. but thank you anyway

Answer 3

No one knows the answer to this question.

In climate change there are winners and losers, and the US, Canada, Northern Europe, and Russia make out really well with some warmer weather.

Other areas may do worse, or not depending on a complex dynamic chaotic system that even in theory cannot make definite predictions.  Systems that contain random inputs cannot be predicted.  

One thing people are really good at, is adapting to new environments, to the point the humans live in space.  A claim no other species can make.

Folks live in the desert, on top of mountains, in the Arctic, etc.  It is common to have temperatures change 100 Fahrenheit over the course of a year in the US.  So a gradual increase of a degree or so over 200 years is not anything people can't easily adjust to.

So the real question is whether the cost of adapting to climate change in the future is more than some preventative measures now.

The answer to that is a definitive no.

The "present value" of some cash flows in the future, negative and positive, is pretty interesting to business, and "net present value" is a common term you find.

A million dollars today in your hand, is more valuable than $50,000 a year for the next 20 years.  Depending on the interest rate you use, the present value of the cash flow can be quite a bit less.  That is why someone that wins the lottery for $80 million can instead take a lump sum payment immediately for a lot less.

No one knows what the cost of adapting to climate change 100 years in the future is going to be, to any degree of precision.  Interest rates, technology, luck, etc. cannot be even guessed at.

But the cost of shutting down the world's economy is pretty well known, in the trillions of dollars.  Enormous.

So the future cost of adaption would have to be just about astronomical to favor any meaningful mitigation today.

That is why everyone that studies this question quickly concludes that anything we do now won't make much difference in the future.

Answer 4

Maybe true.  The number and scale is so large that it is hard to calculate.

But one thing that we know for sure is that the people who save now and cause the pollution might not be the person who is going to pay for it at the end.  It will be paid, but it will be paid by different people at different time.

Ex:  the people who clear the forest or land for mining might not feel the detrimental effect until few generation later.  But by then, that generations might already be dead.

Answer 5

The costs of ignoring global warming could be runaway greenhouse effect.  The cost of runaway greenhouse effect is ... well, we have an easy-to-observe example - it's called Venus.  The cost of having to breathe sulphuric acid is definitely much higher than anything we have to do to prevent that.

Unless you think it's worse to admit that you're wrong than it is to die.

Answer 6

yes

Answer 7

YES , I AGREE WITH YOUR STATEMENT.

Answer 8

This is almost certainly true. The earlier we start at it, the easier it will be to implement the solution(s).

Its true for just about any problem.

"A big problem is just a small problem that was ignored till it became a big problem".

Answer 9

There is no proof of this either way. However, the last time it got warmer than it is now, back in the Medieval Warm Period and before that in the Roman Warm Period, agriculture, architecture and virtually every human endeavor prospered. There was no cost associated with the warming, to the contrary everyone benefitted.

On the other hand, the EPA estimates that adopting the Leiberman-Warner Climate Act of 2008 would cost the US $2.856 trillion annually by the year 2050. This is a very large expense with almost no payoff - by 2098 the US would emit about 25 parts per million less CO2 than it would without the Act.

Global Warming advocates continue to suffer from a variety of Inconvenient Facts that refuse to fit the IPCC models. The tropical troposhere should be heating but it's not. The ocean should be warming but it's not. They initially said the poles would warm first yet Antarctica stubbornly refuses to follow the IPCC directives. Stupid continent. We just had a very cold year, the solar cycle (sunspots) is still totally inactive, temps peaked in 1998 and have never recovered, yet they continue to tell us doom is just around the corner.

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Comparing the Earth to Venus requires ignoring the fact that it's atmosphere is 90 times as dense as ours, there is no liquid water there, it's 1/3 closer to the sun (30 million miles or so), and the CO2 concentration is 96% of the atmosphere compared to .04% here on Earth. Pick up a book sometime.