The Problem With Putting a Price on the End of the World

On a Saturday afternoon in early December, inside a soaring auditorium on the campus of Stockholm University, William Nordhaus gave the crowning lecture of his half-century career as an economist. The occasion was his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in economics, which Nordhaus, a trim, soft-spoken Yale professor, had been jointly awarded. The title of the lecture was “Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics.”

As a young professor on a sabbatical in Vienna in the mid-1970s, Nordhaus happened to share an office with an environmental researcher, who helped spark his interest in the emerging issue. While there, Nordhaus came up with the target, now famous, of holding global warming to two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. He chose the target, as he recently explained to me, because he believed that the earth has experienced similar fluctuations before and that humans had tolerated them.

The Nobel was a tribute to the originality and influence of his work developing economic models that help people think about how to slow climate change. It also seemed to be a cri de coeur from the Swedish academics who choose the economics laureates: Climate change is a threat like no other. Fatal heat waves, droughts, wildfires and severe hurricanes are all becoming more common, and they are almost certain to accelerate. Avoiding horrific damage, as a United Nations panel of scientists recently concluded, will require changes in human behavior that have “no documented historic precedent.”

Read the story from The New York Times Magazine by David Leonhardt - “The Problem With Putting a Price on the End of the World.”

Editor of New 'Sham Journal' Is Climate Science Denier With Ties to Heartland Institute

The title alone of the scientific paper could have suggested one of two things — either the author deserved a Nobel prize in science, or something very odd was going on.

Professor Steve Sherwood knew it was not the former.

The paper’s title was grandiose but sincere — “The Refutation of the Climate Greenhouse Theory and a Proposal for a Hopeful Alternative” — and appeared in a publication with a name that sounded like a legitimate scientific journal. But appearances don't always stack up, and neither did this paper.

“The paper is laughable,” Sherwood told DeSmog.

“It is so riddled with unsupported, fantastic and … or … unintelligible claims, arranged in a disorderly fashion and sprinkled liberally with innuendo,” said the director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Read the Desmog Blog story - “Editor of New 'Sham Journal' Is Climate Science Denier With Ties to Heartland Institute.”

Good advice from Nobel Prize winner, Steven Chu

American physicist and Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1997, and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013, Steven Chu (pictured) said:

‘The climate is changing. The proper political debate would be how to deal with these risks’.

Nobel Prize winner sounds alarm on climate change

E

arly in his career, a scientist named Mario J. Molina was pulled into seemingly obscure research about strange chemicals being spewed into the atmosphere. Within a year, he had helped discover a global environmental emergency, work that would ultimately win a Nobel Prize.

Nobel Prize winner, Mario Molina - it's
totally unacceptable for
humanity not to act on climate change.

Now, at 70, Dr. Molina is trying to awaken the public to an even bigger risk. He spearheaded a committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, which released a stark report Tuesday on global warming.

The report warns that the effects of human emissions of heat-trapping gases are already being felt, that the ultimate consequences could be dire, and that the window to do something about it is closing.

Read The New York Times story - “Scientists Sound Alarm on Climate.”

Tweet from Bill McKibben alerts us, again, to ongoing challenges

The conversation about climate change being human-induced and a threat to humanity is over.

Yet the evidence illustrating this world-changing reality continues to pour in.

The latest comes from 70-year-old scientist and Nobel Prize winner, Mario J. Molina, who won that international coveted award for his understanding of the ozone hole and why it was happening.

Now, Mr Molina is trying to alert the public to an even bigger risk, global climate change.

A story published today in the New York Times headed: “Scientists sound the alarm on climate” quoting Dr Molina the ultimate consequences of climate change could be “dire” and the window to do something about is closing.

In a tweet alerting people to the story, an advocate for climate change action, Bill McKibben, urged those who know people who don’t care about climate to maybe pass onto them this NYT piece: a call to action from scientists.