Climate change to ultimately cost $100,000 per ton of carbon
Two geoscientists and a philosopher from the University of Chicago (UChicago) estimated that an "ultimate cost of carbon" to humanity comes out closer to 100,000 dollars per ton, a thousand times higher than the 100 dollars or less routinely calculated for the cost to our generation.
According to a news release posted on the university's website on Wednesday, the researchers built a model that projected the effects of climate change for hundreds of thousands of years. In that time, sea levels rise as ice sheets melt, and storms and droughts get more intense.
Under this model, the cost of carbon that we burn today explodes to range from 10,000 dollars to 750,000 dollars per ton based on details of the geophysical and economic scenarios. The researchers found a central value of about 100,000 dollars per ton.
"The ultimate costs are a thousand times higher than the more normally calculated present-day value of those costs because climate change will persist for a thousand times longer than our generation will," said David Archer, a computational climate scientist at UChicago, reports Xinhua.
"If you lose 10 percent of your capacity to grow food, in our model, you lose 10 percent of your population and economy," Archer said.
Current economic "social cost of carbon," pioneered by UChicago Professor Michael Greenstone as a number to represent the value of all future damages to our generation in today's dollars, calculates the difference between realistic projections of the economy with and without climate change, which typically comes out to 100 dollars or less per ton.
However, embedded into this calculation is a basic economic principle called the discount rate. Assuming the economy will continually grow means that costs that will come due more than a hundred or so years into the future don't matter much to us today.
"What we wanted to get with this calculation is a better sense of the burden we're placing on future generations," said Archer. "This is not intended to be a realistic calculation of the present-day value of costs, but it's our attempt to try to put the huge time scales into more understandable units.
The study has been published in the journal Climactic Change.
source: UNB
Development, Environment
Advocate Tasmiah new country director, 'Global Peace Chain'
Bangladesh, Environment, Lead News
Hill cutting in Chittagong: Toma group fined Tk 50 crore
Environment, World News
World carbon dioxide emissions drop 7% in pandemic-hit 2020
Bangladesh, Environment, Transportation
Dense fog halts ferry services on Shimulia-Banglabazar route
Columns, Environment
Human society and the biosphere
Climate, Columns, Investment
China's Path to Net Zero
Environment, Op-Ed, Politics
The Environmental Consequences of Political Repression
Bangladesh, Environment, Op-Ed
Glorious days: Waste dumping remains a never ending story
Bangladesh, Environment, Greenwatch Dhaka Blog, Industry, Op-Ed
Bangladesh, Climate, Lead News
Bay depression whips up rainfall across Bangladesh
Bangladesh, Climate
400 tourists stranded on St Martin's island
Bay depression brings widespread rainfall, more forecast