@peterdutoit@mastodon.green posted a link to PDF that I'm still trying to process. The situation might be so much worse – and I always thought I was a pessimist. This is from page 26 in "The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios: Limitations and assumptions of commonly used climate-change scenarios in financial services" by Sandy Trust, Sanjay Joshi, Tim Lenton, Jack Oliver. Sorry for the long quote. The first two paragraphs just set the mood for the punch line at end.
The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios
There is uncertainty around how much warming we will experience. As
described in the previous section, atmospheric GHGs are now double
their pre-industrial level, which is what ECS is calibrated to. A
reminder that best estimate ECS = 3°C but there is an 18% chance
that ECS>4.5°C.
Earth-system sensitivity is greater than ECS, as ECS assumes ice
sheets and vegetation fixed, with a possibility that ESS is
significantly greater than ECS. Conservatively, there is an argument
for at least a 20% chance that we may be on a trajectory to 5°C or
more of warming at current levels of GHGs.
The pace of warming is also uncertain. However, some scientists now
estimate warming of 0.3 °C per decade or around 1°C every 30 years,
which would imply warming of greater than 2°C by 2050 and 3°C by
2080. This is well within life expectancy for many in workplace
schemes now and in range for the European Insurance and Occupational
Pensions Authority (EIOPA) who have specified 80 years as long range
for the Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA).
Put another way, at what point do we expect 50% GDP destruction –
somewhere between 2070 and 2090 depending on how you parameterise
the distribution. It is worth a moment of reflection to consider
what sort of catastrophic chain of events would lead to this level
of economic destruction.
The chances of me living up to 2070 are pretty slim but they are not zero. I'd be 97 and probably in need of care. I wonder how much care I can expect in a world that's crashing like that.
Peter du Toit's comment on fedi was: "Have you wondered how Insurance companies reached the decision to pull out of certain areas in the US? (Which btw will shortly be global phenomenon) Then wonder no more." In the comments below, he added a few more points.
To set the scale, a comparison with the effects of the COVID 19 pandemic: "If this takes a linear path - which it won’t because of unknown feedback loops etc. - then we will be halfway to a 50% GDP destruction by about 2050 (2°C) As a comparison Global GDP dropped slightly above 3% in 2020 due to COVID, pushing 90 million more people globally into extreme poverty."
Peter du Toit also linked to another PDF, Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 Model with Empirical Data from 2021. It's the small passages that bite.
Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 Model with Empirical Data
Research by the International Monetary Fund (IMF, 2014) and the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2017;
2018), amongst others, suggests that the social costs of pollution
and non- renewable resource depletion are currently nowhere fully
reflected in taxes. Fossil fuels alone still carry large government
subsidies (Coady et al., 2017), totalling 6.5% of global gross
domestic product (GDP).
That's how much we're subsidising a small part of the shovel with which we are digging our graves.
#Climate