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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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But there will be an impact, that's for sure.

How do you have any idea what order of magnitude the impact will be? How do you have any idea what the sign of the impact will be?

Sign - yes. It will be a net negative.
Magnitude and scaling characteristics - no.

All the promising positive effects are associated with warming in the north. Based on my previous research, Canada's North is a rocky shelf with a thin soil layer and Siberia's newly defrosted regions will be acidic marshes. There may be agricultural gains in the southern reaches of the Lena/Ob/Yenisei, but those will be limited. The Northern trade routes will reduce dependency on the Panama and Suez, but won't create any novel ground breaking trade routes per-se. Unless birth rates see radical change, the north simply isn't a place with enough people to require the sort of shipping activity that would benefit from Northern trade routes.

If I had to guess, the impact equation would be super-linear with a near impossible to compute constant term.

Economic loss = Humanly_computable_linear_term * temperature_rise^(1<super_linear_exponent_a<2) + Expected_penalty_from_catastrophic_outcome

To me, catastrophic outcomes = simultaneous famine in multiple bread baskets, AMOC weakens, irreversible drop in marine life.

The discussion devolves into a philosophical shouting match because the Expected_penalty_from_catastrophic_outcome involves multiplying infinitesimally small probabilities with negative infinities. The combination leads to a sensitive tail that can collapse to zero or balloon to negative infinity depending on which set of plausible assumptions you start with. Objectivity goes out the door at that point.

Yeah it’s literally impossible. First, climate science itself is based on thousands of different interactions that are hard to model out with degree of accuracy.

Then teasing out that highly uncertain future impact on the economy is nigh impossible.

A limited precaution principle is reasonable but a destroy the economy one isn’t

How do you have any idea what order of magnitude the impact will be? How do you have any idea what the sign of the impact will be?

And this is why I am extremely skeptical of "Pigouvian" taxes. If you don't know the sign and magnitude of the externality, you can't tax (or subsidize) it to compensate.

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