“Peace”

[Kirk Garrett]

The science based conclusion is: "Disaster mortality is not a useful metric for quantifying climate change, and climate-related disasters have increased in number, intensity, and economic cost."



If I were you, nyc, I wouldn't smoke that, sounds like it has pcp in it. Maybe buy some $Trump cyber coin instead, safer for your physical health - but not your financial health.

The point remains. Your argument here is that things are getting worse, not better. And yet climate deaths are decreasing over time. So while you can argue, climate deaths may get worse in the future, that doesn’t solve your problem when you’re trying to make the point that things are getting worse right now.

You want to say that climate deaths are not a good metric for what the climate is doing. Which is backwards. I would argue that life and death would be the key metric for whether things are getting better or worse.

[Mick-7]

The point remains. Your argument here is that things are getting worse, not better. And yet climate deaths are decreasing over time. So while you can argue, climate deaths may get worse in the future, that doesn’t solve your problem when you’re trying to make the point that things are getting worse right now.

You want to say that climate deaths are not a good metric for what the climate is doing. Which is backwards. I would argue that life and death would be the key metric for whether things are getting better or worse.

A simplistic definition of "climate deaths," e.g., the number of people who died directly from heat/cold exposure, will lead to a simplistic and false conclusion. In actuality, climate deaths are caused by a multitude of factors: destruction of housing, loss of arable land and potable water, and the resulting famine and chronic heath effects, etc., which as a whole are very hard to quantify but which increase the simpleton climate death statistic exponentially. You can't see the stars through a microscope.

[Christian Miller]

An obvious issue with the statistics of climate change is that it is hard to directly attribute economic or human cost. A lot of the things that are already costing money and lives are second or third order effects.

As with so many things in the human world causation and correlation are had to disambiguate. And in that is a whole world of wiggle room and ideological litigation.

In terms of deaths due to environmental pollution, things may have improved in the short term in many ways at least in the Western world. Take lead in gasoline, which is calculated to have caused over a million excess deaths a year, and the long term effects of lead exposure can still be felt today on this very forum.

This was not an easy struggle for those who campaigned for it.

[Mick-7]

As with so many things in the human world causation and correlation are had to disambiguate.

Yes, a statistic I Iike is: 90% of all traffic fatalities are caused by wheat (because a study showed that 90% of the drivers who died in traffic accidents had wheat in their intestinal tracks).

[Christian Miller]

Yes, a statistic I Iike is: 90% of all traffic fatalities are caused by wheat (because a study showed that 90% of the drivers who died in traffic accidents had wheat in their intestinal tracks).

Could be worse. Could be economics.

I've spend the day listening to various heterodox economists (mostly MMT) saying why printing money won't raise inflation, and that Rachel Reeves is basically a monster and stupid for not doing it. They seem intelligent and very confident about what they are saying. Are they right? No idea.

Or there's one guy who used to advise Jeremy Corbyn who say that while he thinks Trump's tariffs will create chaos (pretty much everyone does, and also, duh) but thinks the idea of balancing trade with tariffs is essentially a good one and says he proves it using double entry book-keeping. I quite like him because he points out that economists don't really think about energy or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and assume linearity in their mathematical models, which if true, sounds a bit silly, and not assumptions I would have made if I was trying to model macroeconomics (knowing nothing about the field.) OTOH I don't trust him for a second.

I also feel some sympathy for Krugman getting annoyed at all the cool kids thinking they are the first to understand how fiat currency and debt actually works.

I am not sufficiently confident in their theories or experimental data to quite trust any of them, and it seems to me that most economists of any type are very confident in both their simplifying assumptions and their in a way which I find quite ... terrifying. And I was an Astrophysics student. We used to get bullied by the Solid State physicists for not being real scientists.

It's possible Trump may run this printing money experiment on the US economy, so maybe we'll find out! Not many options left to him for getting the tax cuts he wants, and he said he might.

I imagine this should be super fun for all the economists, in much the same way as a nearby Supernova is super fun for astrophysicists. Although I'm not sure the result of the experiment will be enough for either the mainstream or the heterodox guys to change any of their theories. Several economists have commented on the lack of clear Popperite standards of disproof in their profession, but I don't know how willing or able they are to put any of their own pet ideas to the test.

It's interesting because I have no idea who is a genuine wing nut and who is an insightful truth teller. I tend to see it as a warning signal when people are selling online courses though. But then, jazz guitarists do that haha.

It's also entirely possible this is how everyone feels when learning about an area of knowledge completely outside of their expertise. But you won't find any physicists disagreeing about the accuracy of Quantum Electrodynamics in predicting particle interactions for example. It seems as an interested lay observer that there are some fairly fundamental disagreements about the behaviour of the economy.

OTOH I've definitely learned that some simplified economic ideas are very sticky and that's what most people repeat as if they are the gospel truth. So that's a good thing to bear in mind.