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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28143 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Sign - yes. It will be a net negative.

How do you know this? From what I see, you just sort of guesstimated some things on different sides and don't take the timescales of the coupled systems into account. For example, you say:

Unless birth rates see radical change, the north simply isn't a place with enough people

Isn't this one of those things that could plausibly change? There have been entire reports on possible migrations of people, and people can move, populations can grow/dwindle on much faster timescales than climate changes. How do you account for the timescale effects?

Magnitude and scaling characteristics - no.

This is likewise concerning. Reddit search is hopelessly broken, but a while back, I remember one of these "estimates of climate change economic effects" papers coming out, and while I've already said that I think the task is actually impossible, I took the claim at face value and compared it to a contemporary Krugman NYT column that talked about tariffs. His approximate estimate of the reduction in GDP due to tariffs was ~3%, and I don't recall exactly what the particular climate paper gave, but the number that sticks in my mind was like 0.7%; I'm pretty sure it was something less than 1%. If we have no clue whether it's more like 1% or 10%, why should one think that it's more like 1% than 0%... or -1%? Like, how do we actually estimate this with anything other than vibes?

That paper -- one of the IPCC reports -- is something David Friedman (the anarchist, not the ambassador) bangs on a lot. He mentions it here

I think the one I'm remembering might have been a different one that came out later, but yeah, probably similar. There is, of course, a wide range of estimates, depending on model details.

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