Global Warming Items: “Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.”

Regardless of which side of the political debate one is on — it seems prudent to plan for global warming whether investor, advisor or business person.  Risks and likely opportunities will be emerging.  We are politically agnostic but always follow the latest peer-reviewed science — like when our family goes to the doctor.

• MIT – “Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen… the costs will be equivalent to losing 5% (potentially as much as 20%) of global GDP each year, now and forever.” 
• “Climate change is leaving animals and plants little wiggle room, pushing them to the edge of their heat tolerance level” Link to full article
  

 The World Bank’s former top economist took heat when he called for huge investments to head off climate change. Now he says he underestimated how much is needed. 

The report concluded that staving off such crises would require immediate investments equivalent to 1 percent of global GDP over each of the next 10 to 20 years, before the window of opportunity to mitigate the biggest impacts of climate change closes.  And it argued that governments need to set a price on carbon dioxide emissions, through either a tax, a trading scheme, or direct regulations.

The Stern Review, published five years ago this fall, framed the threat of climate change in stark, even shocking, economic terms. The 700-page analysis, which was commissioned by the U.K. government and authored by Nicholas Stern, an economic adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair and a former chief economist of the World Bank, estimated that the costs of climate change, if not addressed, will be equivalent to losing 5 percent (and potentially as much as 20 percent) of the global gross domestic product (GDP) “each year, now and forever.” Hundreds of millions of people could be threatened with hunger, water shortages, and severe economic deprivation. Climate change, Stern wrote, “is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.” Link to full article

• The accuracy of climate science news in Danish high quality newspapers

A significant number of mass media news stories on climate change quote scientific publications. However, the journalistic process of popularizing scientific research regarding climate change has been profoundly criticized for being manipulative and inaccurate. This preliminary study used content analysis to examine the accuracy of Danish high quality newspapers in quoting scientific publications from 1997 to 2009. Out of 88 articles, 46 contained inaccuracies though the majority was found to be insignificant and random. The study concludes that Danish broadsheet newspapers are:

• ‘moderately inaccurate’ in quoting science publications
• but are not deliberately hyping scientific claims.

However, the study also shows that 11% contained confusion of source, meaning that statements originating from press material or other news outlets were incorrectly credited to scientific peer-reviewed publications.