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wasoxygen  ·  613 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Californians asked to cut power use as extreme heat approaches

First I "don't believe in global warming," now I "like global warming," what could be next?

Are you sure we actually disagree, given this degree of difficulty in communicating my position?

For the record, I think we should avoid binary good/bad judgments and use cost-benefit analysis to consider better or worse alternatives.

    it is strange to ponder if there are significant economic benefits from climate change when compared to the costs

Why strange? Aren't you curious to see reality as it is? How can you correct for bias if you dismiss evidence that challenges your beliefs, concluding in advance that it will be too small to matter?

Deaths are a relevant consequence of climate change. Every year people are killed by high temperatures. And every year people are killed by low temperatures. Which number is higher? It's not obvious. If fewer people die in the winter, shouldn't that mitigate some additional heat-related deaths in the summer? Or perhaps climate change will cause more deaths in both winter and summer, but we won't know if we don't look.

Note: Source cites the Fourth National Climate Assessment which claims that "With continued warming, increases in heat-related deaths are projected to outweigh reductions in cold-related deaths in most regions" citing The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States which expresses the same claim, "The reduction in cold-related deaths is projected to be smaller than the increase in heat-related deaths in most regions" ("medium confidence") while recognizing that "Future adaptation will very likely reduce these impacts" i.e. people will install air-conditioning ["Very High Confidence"].

    Disruption is costly.

Switching from animal power to motorized power was costly. Automating manufacture was costly. Eradicating polio was costly. Installing air conditioning is costly. If you do cost analysis instead of cost-benefit analysis you won't get the whole story.

    the optimal latitude to grow crops of a certain type

Relocating a farm doesn't sound easy, but agriculture is constantly changing, with higher yields reducing the amount of land needed. Smil points out that in a satellite image of Spain you can see a large white region at the southern tip. Almería is covered in greenhouses and produces vegetables which are shipped all over Europe, as far as Stockholm. To extend the growing season, some of the greenhouses are heated. (Greenhouses are also enriched with CO₂ to improve yields.)

    Shifting hundreds of millions to billions of people poleward

Why shift? People live with temperature changes of a few degrees every year, indeed every day. People retiring from New York to Florida will endure more climate change than New York will get in a century. Outside of deserts, the hottest regions of the world are populated, and the largest uninhabited regions are cold. We have East African genes.

    Insurance companies have market-driven forces driving up insurance rates almost everywhere

No link so I won't dispute your claim. Climate change could certainly drive up rates, if real rates are in fact rising, but so could rising affluence (we have more valuable things to insure) or cost disease. Swiss Re says "By mid-century, the world stands to lose around 10% of total economic value from climate change." That is a lot of value in absolute terms, but average annual growth of 3% would more than double total economic value in that time, so people will still be better off (1.03^29 × 0.9 = 2.12). The real comparison is to how much climate change mitigation would cost in total economic value.

These numbers are all fairly speculative, but Smil makes a (rueful) case that mitigation is all but hopeless anyway.

    The UN’s first climate conference took place in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, and in the intervening decades we have had a series of global meetings and countless assessments and studies. Annual climate change conferences began in 1995 (in Berlin) and included much publicized gatherings in Kyoto (1997, with its completely ineffective agreement), Marrakech (2001), Bali (2007), Cancun (2010), Lima (2014), and Paris (2015).

    In Paris, about 50,000 people flew to the French capital to attend yet another conference at which they were to strike, we were assured, a “landmark” — and also “ambitious” and “unprecedented” — agreement. Yet the Paris Agreement did not codify any specific reduction targets by the world’s largest emitters. And even if all voluntary non-binding pledges were honored (something utterly improbable), the Paris accord would still result in a 50 percent increase of emissions by 2030.

    Some landmark.

Like Jamie Dimon, he recommends natural gas over coal as a realistic practical measure.

"We can proceed fairly quickly with the displacement of coal- fired electricity by natural gas (when produced and transported without significant methane leakage, it has a substantially lower carbon intensity than coal) and by expanding solar and wind electricity generation."