ABC-Australia reports:
EMMA ALBERICI: How do you rate the likelihood of this $60 trillion catastrophe that you predict?
CHRIS HOPE: It’s a mean value from the models that we run. So, it’s important to emphasise that it’s by no means the most alarmist outcome, it’s by no means the worst outcome. What we do is we look at all the possibilities that there might be for just how serious climate change could be, what the climate sensitivity might be, how vulnerable different economies are to climate change, and we run those many, many times through the model. In fact, we run the model 10,000 times to take account of all those risks. And what we find is that it’s possible that we might cheat nature and the climate sensitivity might be lower than we think it is and we might just possibly get away with extra impacts of only about $10 trillion over the next 50 to 70 years. There’s about a five per cent chance that the extra impacts will be as low as that. But on the other hand, there’s a five per cent chance that the extra impacts could be as high as $220 trillion. So, you know, when we take account of all those ranges, all those risks and take the average of them all, we come up with the $60 trillion of extra impact.
Why trillions, when it could cost . . . quadrillions?
Averaging 10,000 bad answers doesn’t give you a good answer.
How can you argue? They ran it 10,000 times! Never mind that econometric models can’t predict much of anything with accuracy even in the next three months. So, you couple weak econometric modelling with GCM fantasies and you get $60 trillion predictions. Sigh….
$60 trillion is nothing. The FED will just print some more money.
Unfortunately, a lot of the money the FED is already printing goes to pay for useless and fraudulent studies like these.
The earth produces methane by a lot of processes and releases methane by a lot of processes. Releasing a huge amount of methane suddenly from the Arctic permafrost would require a temperature shift far above any prediction and for a long time. Meantime, if we harvest that methane, risk mitigated.