How to do climate change wrong

Published June 18, 2018 5:58pm ET



There’s yet another report telling us how much damage climate change is going to do. This one is from the Union of Concerned Scientists, telling us how many coastal properties are going to be somewhere between flooded often and destroyed. This is an excellent example of how to do the economic analysis of climate change wrong, on the entirely reasonable basis that they’ve entirely ignored economics when constructing their estimates.

Some 300,000 homes will flood regularly in 30 years’ time, apparently. Unsurprisingly, given that most of the state is hardly above high tide right now, Florida will be worst affected. The scientists, inevitably, start from an overestimate of future emissions, for quite obviously they would assume that nothing we’ve done already will have any effect. A 6.5 foot sea level rise by 2100 is assuming that low-price solar and wind power just isn’t going to have any effect at all.

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