The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World Hardcover – October 22, 2013

Before the reader comes to the end of page 1, economic growth and global warming are shown to be partners in peril to humanity alongside the entire natural world. Global warming caused by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas are the irreplaceable friends of human comforts and economic dependencies. Enter global warming consequential to the above as humanity finds economic and habitat benefits in abundance as never before.The current daily routine activities of planet earth's 7.6 billion human inhabitants is an incremental force of unprecedented and currently unknowable consequences on existing cultures, ecologies, economies and borders. The unrelenting upward trajectory of human dominance and attendant consumptive and waste dispatches is a journey into portentous islands of undiscovered anthropics. The population of planet earth's humanity was two billion in 1900.As the numbers of human competitors advances so also do the demands on energy sources defined almost exclusively as fossil fuel related.Evidence from history studies report that major extinctions of life forms total five, that the sixth is in progress, mostly from the footprint of humanity.The technology already exists that could substantially mitigate the influences of global warming but political and economics issues are formidable barriers in nations such as China and India who rely on coal-burning as a cheap energy source needed to anticipate massive demands from a combined human population of several billion.Climate scientists seem united as they point to a human-caused climate change. "The planet is warming… consequences are that planet earth will reflect warming greater than during any period in the past half million years."Umbriago

I was expecting a more dogmatic book pushing a specific agenda. That is not the case here. I thought Nordhaus spoke well about the limitations of modelling climate change and was even handed in presenting the costs and benefits of action. We should take steps to limit carbon emissions, not because there is a definite and known outcome, but rather because there is a higher likely hood of negative outcomes (the "casino").Such even handedness is apparent in such statements:-Clouds are really though for modelling because they both heat and cool the planet-Costs of warming seem to be about 1-2% of income-Temperatures are modelled to rise only about 1 degree over the next four decades-Warming would benefit a lot of the developed world (higher ag yields/co2 fertilization)-The health and economic impacts would most likely be small-Places 10 meters above sea level seem relatively safe from rising waters-Carbon Concentrations were 8x higher during the Jurassic periodThese are no reasons to not take action. If governments are going to tax anything, it makes sense to tax pollution. That would provide a pricing mechanism to the market to choose less polluting facilities and would incentivize the creation of new technologies. Given that the costs are not great, a carbon tax would not need to be high. The problem is also more tractable than I previously thought since 95% of US emissions are limited to electricity generation and transportation and as much as 80% of emissions come from the use of oil and coal.

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Excelente experiencia

Bill Nordhaus does a great job of approaching climate change from a risk management, business oriented approach, incorporating new information from scientists about the risks of climate change. And he summarizes by considering practical political limitations to getting anything done. With the latest data on the impacts of projected CO2 and Temperature within likely ranges we will see, he shows impacts over the range, costs to avoid the worst tipping points, etc. His discussion of tipping points is especially helpful as the risk of triggering catastrophic impacts hinges around tipping points, understanding them, assessing our odds of tripping them, and evaluating the costs of options we have in the near term for optimizing our strategies to try to avoid passing any of these catastrophic thresholds. I'm hoping my generation (the baby boomers) won't be held responsible for catastrophic climate change, and while things are not looking too good right now, this PhD economist provides some valuable tools to the practical among us who want to deal with this as optimally as possible. I hope more of us read his book and give this huge challenge some serious consideration.

Used this as one of three books in a climate change course for first year college students. A strength is the disciplined approach to thinking about tradeoffs in policy making: as a macroeconomist, he does that in spades.This is also the downside. Like most economists, however, he comes across as a bit removed from reality when discussing adaptations "in the long run", given we are seeing people suffer consequences now -- eg, don't worry about the collapse of food markets, as wheat farming will just move further north (and unlike many economists considering "optimality", there is not even the bother of discussing how we perhaps could compensate those farmers, and their entire communities, left behind); don't worry about people near the rising seas, as they can move (and isn't Lagos is overpopulated, anyway?). This is small comfort to present climate refugees, and a real avoidance of the political problems associated with migration and adaptation.Just know that the warming that is predicted won't have that substantial effect in human life years, and also discount generations unborn (since we already do), and pretty soon, 3 degrees celsius is the minimal goal we should shoot for.