Adaptation is the poor cousin of climate change policy

Announcing new climate change policies is something Australian politicians have learned to fear the most. Over the past decade, climate change politics has knocked off four prime ministers, and split political parties and allegiances apart at their core.

‘Even with the most aggressive mitigation efforts, Australian
society is already being impacted by a changing climate and
will continue to do so’.

The political risks in this election campaign are no doubt even more exacerbated, with many calling this the “climate election”. Nor is this a battle that is limited to the Green versus Labor swing seats. It is perhaps even more acute in key traditionally safe conservative seats. Buoyed by the result in the Wentworth byelection, several high profile independents are taking on Tony Abbott, Josh Frydenberg and Greg Hunt. Central to their campaign is climate change action.

Read the story from The Guardian by Rob Law - “Adaptation is the poor cousin of climate change policy.”

We are almost certainly underestimating the economic risks of climate change

One of the more vexing aspects of climate change politics and policy is the longstanding gap between the models that project the physical effects of global warming and those that project the economic impacts. In a nutshell, even as the former deliver worse and worse news, especially about a temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius or more, the latter remain placid.

Electrification is coming.

The famous DICE model created by Yale’s William Nordhaus shows that a 6-degree rise in global average temperature — which the physical sciences characterize as an unlivable hellscape — would only dent global GDP by 10 percent.

Projections of modest economic impacts from even the most severe climate change affect climate politics in a number of ways. For one thing, they inform policy goals like those President Obama offered in Paris, restraining their ambition. For another, they fuel the arguments of “lukewarmers,” those who say that the climate is warming but it’s not that big a problem. (Lukewarmism is the public stance of most Trump Cabinet members.)

Read the story from Vox by David Roberts - “We are almost certainly underestimating the economic risks of climate change.”