William Nordhaus has died

So if agricultural output fell by 50% he isn't considering how this would affect the cost of living and it's impact on labor prices and supply, which would cascade towards the whole economy. He's pretending it doesn't matter because the exchange value of that output is proportionately low in GDP calculations.

US mortality rates declined during the 1930s. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends...

World infant mortality rates generally declined during the 1930s. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/nfant-Mortality-Rates-18...

The entire reason Alfred Nobel even came up with the price is that he didn't want to be remembered as the merchant of death once he passed away.

He made his fortune using explosives, in other words, he made money off of killing people.

Now this guy (Nordhaus) is willingly stepping up in justifying mass extinction and then gets a "in memory of Nobel" prize, basically glorifying "the merchant of death" and thereby turning the entire Nobel price idea on its head.

Nordhaus's model is best described as an "Optimal extinction model". The type of model you would advocate because you're not going to survive until the consequences hit, so him dying today isn't some sad event, it's him shirking his responsibility to the future.

This might not be climate change denial but the effects are basically the same.

I'm not sure there is any point in hair splitting whether someone wants to or accidentially lets humanity die out.

In either case you should ignore his research.

"The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate.

...

Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 per cent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” "

https://theecologist.org/2023/nov/01/when-idiot-savants-do-c...

Which is tragic because it is a neoclassical fiction book misleading millions of students. Anyone who is really interested in the history of economic thought will avoid that book for anything other than being a reference of the theoretical position of the neoclassical synthesis.

If that is the standard of argument good enough to win the economics "Nobel" prize all we can draw from this is how much of a politically motivated farce that prize is.

https://johnmjennings.com/the-nobel-prize-in-economics-isnt-...

The reason is quite basic. Global temperature includes the oceans which make up 70% of earth's surface and have a higher storage capacity for heat. So a 4°C global temperature rise might be closer to an 8°C increase to your current local average temperatures and that's the normal days. If you have heat waves those might be +15°C or more.

At those temperatures, Americans and Europeans might need air conditioned buildings just to survive. Other places will require people to wear portable air conditioners.

Obviously you'll also need to move all agriculture indoors.