Neoclassical economists should not be believed at all for anything ever.

An article worth reading in its entirety. Nordhaus’ models predict even a 6C increase as not that bad, this doesn’t even pass a common sense test. The fact that this fantasy outlook has sway with governments is terrifying and bodes ill for our future.

The number of idiot savants deciding our lives is too damn high.

I meet these people in industry and academia. They have masters or even PhD’s, but lack common sense and humility.

And then they tinker their models and advise the managers, who have even less knowledge.

The result is entirely predictable.

Technocracy was supposed to be better.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Start with your typical textbook for the dismal science — say, the definitive one by Paul Samuelson, co-written with Nordhaus, titled “Economics.” The book is considered “the standard-bearer” of “modern economics principles.” You’ll find in its pages a circular flow diagram that shows “households” and “firms” exchanging money and goods.

Such calculations do not account for extreme weather, vector-borne diseases, displacement and migration, international and local conflict, mass morbidity and mortality, biodiversity crash, state fragility, or food, fuel, and water shortages.

This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean.

According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean.

Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models.

Andrew Glikson, who teaches at Australian National University in Canberra and advises the IPCC, has written about the coming era of mass human death, what he calls the Plutocene, the natural successor to the Anthropocene.

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