I was invited by UCSC professor emeritus Sandra Faber to join the new Earth Futures Institute (EFI) at UCSC. This was in light of my work in the past 12 years in climate science, and the connections between civilization, economics, and thermodynamics. The purpose of the EFI is to perform and communicate scholarly work on the long term sustainability of the Earth, given the large scale constraints imposed by Nature, and how to achieve such a stable sustainable state given our precarious position today.
The work shared here strengthens the links between Cabrillo College and Cabrillo's largest transfer destination for students - UC Santa Cruz. It also shares the efforts I've made originally in service for my Cabrillo climate course Astro 7 "Planetary Climate Science", fostering new links with other researchers around the world in the rapidly growing field of climate science and climate / civilization understandings.
I was asked to provide an evaluation of the work of Yale economics professor William Nordhaus in view of modern climate science, as my first contributions to EFI. In 2018 Nordhaus was awarded the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, funded by the Swedish Central Bank. The media refers to this erroneously as the "Nobel Prize in Economics", but in fact, Alfred Nobel did not choose to fund or award a prize in Economics. The Swedish Central Bank controls who is invited to be nominated (not the Swedish Academy of Sciences, who controls the Nobel Prizes), and they stipulated in their funding that they would keep the process a secret till 50 years afterwards. There is a documented bias towards Neoclassical economists such as William Nordhaus exemplifies. Nordhaus was given this prize for his work over the past decades on climate change economics. Climate scientists have been uniformly harsh in their criticism of Nordhaus' work, whose "DICE" cost/benefit model claims climate change is not worth the cost of changing our behavior unless we reach +4C temperature change. A number of economists are also harshly critical of Nordhaus and similar other models. But given the imprimatur of the prize, Nordhaus has become very influential among policy makers who use his flawed modelling, his deeply flawed portrayal of climate science, and his post-2018 Nobel association in order to justify continued economic policy inaction. To paraphrase Nordhaus in a recent YouTube interview - 'Let's just continue getting wealthier now, and then we can be better able to fund any climate actions in the future, if necessary'. Actual climate scientists know this advice is foolhardy. It fails understanding of the momentum inertia of the thermally massive climate system, of tipping points that are taking the Earth into a state in which current life was not evolved for, and from which we cannot recover. It fails understanding of the cost in lives, ecosystems, and damage to the fabric and perhaps even the existence of organized society, and that such will be crippling for centuries and millennia. Confronting Nordhaus' work and other Neoclassical economists' work bluntly is therefore critically important to communicate to the public and to policy people, if effective policy is to have any hope of being created and put into action.
The climate science that Neoclassical economists continue to ignore is vast and growing; my originally scheduled single Nordhaus critique talk evolved into 3 separate talks. Parts 1,2, 3 of "The Economics of Climate Damage", given on May 12, 26 and June 9, 2022. These talks were preceeded by a talk from EFI founder Prof. Sandra Faber in early May, introducing the mathematical formalism of Nordhaus' DICE model and pointing out one of the most critical consequences of climate change - exceeding the wet-bulb temperature limit for human survivability in the tropics (e.g. Raymond et al. described here). My talks below were given at the atrium at the Center for Adaptive Optics on the UC Santa Cruz campus, and by zoom to other EFI members. Below I've linked the PDF versions of the PowerPoint presentations I gave, with some post-talk clarifications added to the text. As ongoing resources, I've taken time to fix post-talk typo's, add a few slides, links, and otherwise improve understanding and clarity. I'll continue to do touch-ups as necessary. Good science is always a work in progress!
At some point, EFI hopes to have a YouTube channel for posting the video zoom presentations together with the questions/answers period. And, I plan to give versions of these talks to the wider community, staged likely at Cabrillo College.