NGFS—the Network for Greening the Financial System—is a group of all the world's central banks that tries to estimate the macroeconomic effects of climate change. They published their latest report this week, and it's grim:
This is the "current policy" projection, and they estimate that global GDP in 2050 will be 15% lower than it would be if there were no climate change. That's only 25 years away.
Note that this is not a bunch of lefty enviro rabble rousers. It's central bankers, normally a fairly sober lot. But like insurance companies and the military, they're starting to get pretty worried.
Still, probably not much will be done. Here are the regional effects of climate change from the study that underpinned the NGFS report:
The effects of climate change are mostly felt in poor areas like South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and China. Europe and the US are affected only modestly. So hurricanes and wildfires will continue to get our attention, but the major damage will be just another headline on page 13 about flooding in Bangladesh or famine in Africa. Out of sight, out of mind.
Maybe buying Greenland wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
It was never a bad idea....for America.
The idea that this peaceful, social democratic protectorate of Denmark would want to come under the yoke of the United States of Dysfunction was always at best a sick joke.
I hope you realize I was joking.
Buying Greenland was never a bad idea on the theory that it was a poor investment--we never even got to that point. It was a moronic clownshow because Trump like a dolt announced it in public without (a) talking to the Danes first, or (b) figuring out if the Danes were interested in selling/philosophically or legally *capable* of selling, even if they wanted to. He then threw a petulant sulk fit when Denmark politely informed him that no, they were not interested.
The whole affair made Trump (and us, by extension) look erratic, stupid, and deeply weird. It's like if your local neighborhood held a meeting to discuss a block party, and one guy stood up, pointed, and said that he'd like to talk about buying that family's highschool junior, and then storming off in a huff when said family is like "um, no."
Sorry, I know all that. I was joking.
Ah, sorry--I should have realized. I'm a bit on edge these days; got some bad news on tuesday, and it's got me rattled.
Good thing we just elected a guy that's promised to fix everything! That was a close call, but everyone can rest easy now. I'm sure he'll resolve this hoax very quickly. Like nobody's ever seen before. Might be a little more than 2 weeks, but he's very strong and powerful, so fingers crossed.
Once the ice caps melt, it will mostly be blueland. As in, under water. Since it's under solid water now, I guess I have to say under liquid water.
Is the actual land of Greenland that low today, and it would not rise once the weight of the ice was gone?
Yes it would rise. Somewhat unevenly but it would rise.
How much depends upon the study you read.
That's a huge amount of weight to be removed. I wonder if that would affect the earths mantle?
Yes, slowly. One of the reasons that the Red River of the North floods so frequently is that the earth along its course is still rebounding from the weight of the ice sheet from the last Ice Age, leveling its bed and slowing its flow. I was told this by a college professor friend from North Dakota.
So if I am reading this right, they are saying that we are already at 3% below some predicted trendline and will be at 6% below trend by 2030. So it should be straightforward to go back however many years to the original prediction and compare.
It will be Elysium on Earth.
After the culling.
What is the baseline year?
Climate change will put a huge strain on the financial system(s) world wide.
We already see what its doing to insurance companies who are refusing to insure people's houses that are in high risk areas. The result seems to be government intervention into the market place but that get convoluted.
Florida goes underwater and many areas of my home state of NC are affected.
Please don't forget that as sea levels rise so do water tables just inshore from the ocean frontage. This will be just as costly to homeowners and insurers
Central banks are beginning to see the financial effects that just the start of climate change has caused. They are not a group that goes off the deep end for anything.
I saw a video of some techbro type saying that if sea levels rose 5 feet or even 10 feet in the next century, people would just sell their property and move. Suddenly a loud pounding was heard, an axe came through the wall, and an irate guy yelled (somewhat bowdlerized): "Sell them to WHO? F#@ king Aquaman?!?"
Link here.
That was Ben Shapiro. Not exacly a tech bro.
He's just another talking head with stupid answers to serious questions.
That map is just bad, because melting permafrost permanently reduces the fertility of land, and all the species dying off due to heat stress and disease is not moderate.
So what. The war was lost Tuesday night.
The other week a report pointed out that the path we were on was taking the Earth to +3°C by 2100. Trump winning means the US is going to backslide by over a decade as Republicans (a) cut discretionary spending on investments in renewable energy research and construction; (b) roll back climate-related regulations; (c) and doing everything to make fossil fuels exceedingly cheap under the guise of stopping inflation.
Americans and the world will be addicted to cheap fossil fuels for decades.
Recall, a May 2024 Monmouth poll showed only 50% of 18-34 year old Americans thought climate change was a serious threat. If at best, only half of the people who will feel the worst effects of climate change believe it is a serious threat, there's no future where even a Democratic sweep of government leads us to any more serious climate legislation. If all those folks who stayed at home on Tuesday did so because they were single-issue voters, there's no hope for solving climate change.
When the world finally gets serious about climate change, it'll be because we blew past several tipping points that led to tangible, catastrophic changes, at which point it'll be decades too late.
This is not defeatism; this is realism. Smarter people are going to have to plan around this inevitability and act accordingly.
Most of the stuff he says he's going to do he'll in reality be unable to do. Take oil prices. "Drill, baby, drill"
This plan assumes that oil companies are going to go to remote areas where production costs will be high, produce vast quantities of oil in order to push prices down so that the new production becomes uneconomic. This is far too complex for Trump to understand, but I'm quite certain oil company executives understand it perfectly well.
The plan is more likely about expanding access to public lands to drill or frack, for very cheap leases.
You cannot assume that, because the last time around he was ineffective at policy, he will once again be ineffective. Last time, he didn't have a plan (2025) and people who were dedicated to the implementation of its policies.
FrankM is right. The oil companies already own leasing rights they are not using, for exactly the reason he states. Extraction costs, not the cost of leases, dominates. IIRC, the last time around, few companies even bothered to bid.
I wasn't exactly implying that the cost of leases is what's holding back fossil fuel extraction; I probably should have left that part out. The point is, Trump is going to expand areas of cheap fossil fuel extraction -- https://www.ogj.com/general-interest/government/article/55241389/biden-moves-to-limit-oil-drilling-in-anwr-hours-after-trumps-election
Once these areas are opened up, it'll be difficult to claw them back. Ergo, the Trump administration is going to make it impossible for Americans (and the world) to get off their fossil fuel addiction.
This. The picture is bleak, but even a concerted effort by a Trump administration can't wreck everything.
US gasoline consumption has already peaked, which means that investor types are going to be increasingly hesitant to finance buildouts of refineries etc., since a lot of such infrastructure makes its money on multi-decadal paybacks.
Will banks make the bet that in 2050 or 2060, there will still be the sort of demand for gasoline such that irrevocably bolting billions of dollars to the ground in the form of oil infrastructure in 2025 was a good idea? Some, probably. But fewer and fewer as time goes on, no matter what lameduck oldman Trump does.
US gas consumption may have peaked because more drivers are going electric, but inasmuch as that is driven (n.p.i.) by state mandates, which Trump will almost certainly attempt to reverse, consumers are going to gladly leave behind all the inconveniences of EVs and come back to fossil.
Except adoption of EVs isn't being driven by state mandates; Advanced Clean Cars II doesn't even start kicking in until next year.
EV sales are growing because EVs are actually frequently just better vehicles than comparable ICE vehicles. Quieter, cheaper, easier to maintain, etc., and more convenient for a great majority of use cases. Yeah, might be (for now) less convenient for long road trips, but that's very little of what most people do.
Moreover, I'm talking about the next 20-30 years, not the next 2-3. Even if Trump could completely gut the California waivers and try to bollox up fuel efficiency standards and zero-emission sales targets (over the objections of the auto industry, mind you), that only really impacts short-term investments. Put another way, Trump may be pro-fossil and anti-EV*, but he'll be out of office and/or dead in just a few years. Finance types making billion dollar concrete-and-steel infrastructure decisions are looking at multi-decadal trends, not so much what might happen with the next Congress.
______
*But look at Trump gush over Musk, and ask yourself if Trump cares more about flattery from Tesla than flattery from Exxon.
There's no "around" to plan. Soon methane will be pouring out of the perma-frost at astonishing rates. Yes, methane only has a "half-life" of 40 years, so even though it's trapping effect is much greater than that of Carbon Dioxide, it seems like it should be short-lived, right?
Wrong! When methane "decays" it creates Carbon Dioxide and water. (CH4 + 2O2 = 2H2O + CO2. So for every molecule of methane you get two molecules of water (good!) and one molecule of Carbon Dioxide, which "extends" the warming -- albeit much less effectively -- for four millennia.
For those of a religious bent, it would seem that God ("Yaweh", "Allah", "The Lord", etc, etc) is actually Dr. Frankenstein. He created a suicidal monster that is ruining everything and killing everybody.
Yeah, permafrost methane release is one of those tipping points we're already on our way to reaching.
We'll just move to the poles! Or just that one pole with land. And find something else to eat besides the cereal crops that have undergirded our civilizations for 10,000 years.
Easy peasy.
That red across the southern half of the US corresponds to a reduction of 10-20% in per capita income. That's substantial. I wouldn't call that modest just because other parts of the world are going to be worse.
That assumes that the Gulf Stream doesn't collapse...
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/gulf-stream-current-could-collapse-in-2025-plunging-earth-into-climate-chaos-we-were-actually-bewildered
hmmm, --I'm only in a medium-salmon burn zone.
Should be OK.
So long as 300 mile, overnight astrophotography jaunts in ICE vehicles can continue it will be all good …
Don't be shitty. As important as carbon emission reduction is, the only thing that will save us is getting to a closed carbon cycle economy. Being a dick to a work-at-home cancer patient with a hobby doesn't advance that goal.
+1
It would be helpful if the map came with an explanation of what the colors mean.
I keep hearing that his shut down in the Gulf Stream isn't a hoax, and may be coming. If so, Europe isn't going to be spared worst case scenarios. In fact, Europe will be fucked, although ironically it's because it will become too cold.
Actually, we don’t have to worry about flooding in Bangladesh, because there won’t be a Bangladesh anymore, it will be ocean floor.
Continental shelf.
If they're worried, why do they keep supporting Republicans?
Oh yeah. I forgot. They're leaving us to bake while they take up residence on Mars.