Jeremy Grantham: commitment

Transcript context

…If I try to seek out the most serious efforts to estimate the costs of global warming, say, by 2200, I end up at the papers of Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. He comes up with figures somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of global GDP, which, as you know, is an enormous amount of money, especially come 2200. Now, does that strike you as a fair estimate or an underestimate? It strikes me as utterly trivial and only producible by economists. When economists try, they can be absolutely nitwitted. The guy who got the Nobel Prize for it [William Nordhaus], for his work on climate change — actually he spelled it out. He said, “Even if there was 10 degrees centigrade, it would only cost something in the range of 10 percent of GDP. ” To which I say, “Dudes, we will be long gone as a species at 10 degrees centigrade. ” It is quite obvious at 1.1 that we are already having trouble. At 2, we will be struggling and societies will fail here, there, and everywhere. At 3, in a sense, forget about it, and we may have to deal with it, but it will be grievous. At 10 degrees . . . It takes real imagination to come up with a little number of GDP loss. No, they’re complete jokes. You cannot find a serious climate scientist who would bet that society, as we know it on a global basis, will still be around at 5 degrees centigrade. I have met a lot of them, and I ask them this question. Not one thinks we have any material chance of a stable society at 5 degrees centigrade. The idea that you can bandy around 10 is reserved for Nobel Prize winners. Sure, but we probably won’t see a 5-degree or 10-degree hike in the temperature. If we look at what is most likely — it’s not just economists who say this, but these are papers co-authored with climate scientists, and markets seem to agree with them — that costs of global warming, climate change will be highly significant but not existential, not a complete disaster for civilization if you look, say, at prices for coastal property, prices in Florida, prices in the Hamptons. So, it’s the market and economists broadly agreeing, and you just think they’re wrong?…

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