Random Thoughts

EIA AEO 2019 projections versus MAB (yours truly)

The Energy Information Administration has a long and sorry history of underestimating the growth of renewable energy in the U.S. I think their AEO (Annual Energy Outlook) in 2019 is no different. On a somewhat-related note, the folks at the Watts Up With That website seem to be hung up on the fantasy that coal-fired electric power will remain at the levels projected by the EIA. They also dream of a nuclear power revival in the U.S...or even that nuclear power won't fade to nearly nothing in the U.S. in the next 3 decades. (Don't get me wrong...I like to dream about liquid fluoride thorium reactors myself...but I know it's a dream at least for the next 2-3 decades.)

Here is a table that contains energy consumption in quads (quadrillion Btu) in the U.S. in 2017, and then projected for 2030, 2040, 2050, and 2070. There are values from the the EIA AEO 2019, and values from me (MAB).

There are many significant differences between the EIA projections and mine. Here's a list, in rough order of importance:

1)  I think the EIA once again blows their "Other Renewable Energy" projections, big-time. They have Other Renewable Energy (i.e. photovoltaics and wind) only increasing from 3 quads to 9 quads from 2017 to 2050. My projection is 3 quads to 42 quads from 2017 to 2050. In particular, I predict an explosion in photovoltaic electricity production. 

2)  The EIA only has coal dropping from 14 quads in 2017 to 11 quads in 2050. I predict coal will be at 2 quads in 2050. I expect more than 90 percent of the utility coal-fired power plants that were operating in 2017 to be closed by 2050.

3)  The EIA has nuclear power only dropping from 8 quads in 2017 to 7 quads in 2050. Presumably they expect virtually all the nuclear plants operating in the U.S. in 2017 to still be operating in 2050. I think that's insane. Many of those plants would be over 70 years old!

4)   The EIA predicts virtually no drop in oil consumption from 2017 to 2050. I predict a drop of 36 percent, as the transportation system becomes electrified (with battery operated cars, buses, and many trucks). 

Who's in "Fantasy Land"?

The "Watts Up With That?" website has a review of the Energy Information Administration's (EIA's) 2018 Annual Energy Outlook (AEO 2018) by David Middleton. Mr. Middleton thinks AEO 2018 "rocks." He very impressed that "Coal Keeps on Chugging Away" (see his graph with that title, below). The EIA AEO 2018 predicts that coal-fired power plant capacity ("summer capacity, per Mr. Middleton) will drop from about 274 in 2015 to about 218 GW in 2026, but then will remain almost perfectly flat until 2050. 

Graph per David Middleton, based on EIA AEO 2018.

Why does the EIA think that coal-fired power plant capacity will hold constant from 2026 to 2050? I'm not sure, because coal-fired power plants aren't getting any younger, and many of them are in serious economic danger even in 2018, which will be a brutal year for coal-fired power plants.

Per Mr. Middleton, the AEO 2018 also has on page 86, that, "The Reference case projects a steady decline in nuclear electric generating capacity—from 99 gigawatts (GW) in 2017 to 79 GW in 2050 (a 20% decline)—with no new plant additions beyond 2020."

According to the EIA in August 2017, there were 99 nuclear reactors in the U.S. So that's 99 reactors, with a capacity of approximately 99 GW, or approximately 1 GW per reactor. It appears that their initial commercial operation dates break down as follows:

Initial Commercial Operation	Number of Plants
1965-1970	5
1971-1975	32
1976-1980	14
1981-1985	20
1986-1990	25
Post 1990	3

From looking at the table, it can be seen that all but 3 reactors will have been in commercial operation for more than 60 years in 2050, if they are still operating in 2050. And a total of 51 of them started commercial operation before 1980, so they will have been in commercial operation for more than 70 years if they're still operating in 2050. What is the probability that 79 GW of the existing fleet of nuclear reactors (i.e. approximately 79 reactors, at 1 GW per reactor) will still be operating in 2050? I say the answer is that the probability is much less than 50 percent.

Finally, David Middleton noted that, "About 45% of the current natural gas capacity consists of peakers, ~202 GW."

He provided an Excel spreadsheet which purportedly had an EIA list of the power plants expected to retire by 2047:  EIA Table 6-6, Released January 24, 2018

I didn't see many natural gas "peaker" plants (either natural gas combustion turbines or natural gas steam turbines) in the list. So I made the following predictions:

1) Many nuclear units are going to retire in the 2026-2047 time frame.

2) Many coal units are going to retire in the 2026-2047 time frame.

3) Many…and possibly *all*–natural gas peaking plants will retire between now and 2047. (Natural gas peaker plants will be replaced by batteries. It’s a question of when, not if.)

David Middleton's response:

"Maybe in Fantasy Land."

So who's in "Fantasy Land"? Is it me, or is it the EIA in their AEO 2018? I'll be providing the reasoning behind my statements in subsequent posts. 

Counterfactual debate: If Congress had not declared war in WW II

David Nieporent has made the amazing claim that, if Congress had voted not to declare war against Japan in World War II, the U.S. still would have been at war with Japan. This boggles my mind. I don't see what the purpose of the Founders writing into the Constitution that only Congress had the power to declare war, if even if Congress blatantly refused to declare war, we would still be at war.

 

This is an invitation to Mr. Nieporent to comment on why he thinks that the U.S. can be at war even if Congress explicitly refuses to declare war.

GDPs with and without climate change

Ed Dolan posted at the Niskanen Center blog on the question of what GDPs would be in 2099 with and without climate change. His graph of GDPs "with" climate change was based on the work of Burke et al. (Nature, 2015), and data published on their website. However, the data published on their website was based on the SSP5 scenario, which is similar to the RCP 8.5 scenario, which has extremely unrealistic (incredibly high) projections of coal usage in the 21st century. Anyway, Ed Dolan's figure looked like the one I recreated below (Ed Dolan's figure appears as an insert in the top-right of my graph).

 

The question is, what would the graph look like for a more realistic scenario, like RCP 4.5? To find out, I performed the following analysis:

1) I obtained the global average temperature increase for the RCP 8.5 scenario and the RCP 4.5 scenario from wonderful Wikipedia. The mean temperature increase is 3.7 degrees Celsius for RCP 8.5 and 1.8 degrees Celsius for RCP 4.5. So the increase in temperature is about half as much for RCP 4.5 as for RCP 8.5. The response of GDP to temperature, from the Burke et al. analysis, indicates an inverted "U" shape, peaking at about 15 degrees Celsius, and sloping away more and more quickly farther from the peak. I therefore assumed that a temperature change of half as much for RCP 4.5 versus RCP 8.5 would have about one-quarter of the effect on GDP for each country as the RCP 8.5 (/SSP5) scenario. The resultant graph looks like this (once again, the original Ed Dolan graph is in the top-right):

I welcome any more-refined analysis based on the work of Burke et al. (Nature, 2015). However, I think my analysis is probably pretty close to what they'd get. Unsurprisingly there is much less effect on GDPs for a global average temperature increase of 1.8 degrees Celsius than a global average temperature increase of 3.7 degrees Celsius.

JULY 27TH UPDATE

I realized I made errors in how I should translate the idea that half the temperature change results in one-quarter of the effect. Here is my new graph for what the GDPs would look like without and with climate change of the magnitude in the RCP 4.5 scenario.

 JULY 28TH UPDATE

I realized I was still making errors in my July 27th analysis and that the "one-quarter effect for one-half temperature change" rule was a bit crude. So I did a more sophisticated analysis. If anyone is interested in the details, contact me. Here are the results of the more sophisticated analysis:

 

 

Here's a table for some selected countries, spanning varying initial temperatures, initial GDPs, and growth rates without climate change.

The "money" columns here are the "Ratio 2099/2010 without CC (climate change)" and the column that shows the ratio of 2099/2010 GDPs for the RCP 4.5 scenario (as calculated by me, based on "more sophisticated analysis." For example, for the United Arab Emirates (one of the hottest countries in the world, and already rich) the ratio of GDP in 2099 to GDP in 2010 is 4.6 without climate change, and 0.3 with climate change at the RCP 8.5 level (both per Burke et al. in Nature 2015). My calculated ratio with climate change at the RCP 4.5 ratio is 2.6. In contrast, for the Russian Federation (a cold relatively poor country) the ratio is 10 without climate change, 50 with climate change at the RCP 8.5 level, and 32 with climate change at the RCP 4.5 level.

Overall, according to my analysis, climate change at the RCP 4.5 level has very little effect on GDPs when compared to no climate change (see the figure directly above).

Mark Bahner vs Wigley and Raper (Science 2001) vs IPCC RCPs

These are comparisons of cumulative global industrial CO2 emissions in the 21st century from three sources:

1) A Wigley and Raper paper in Science in 2001,

2) My response to the Wigley and Raper paper, with my (much better) predictions, published on my blog in 2006, and

3) The IPCC Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios, including the "business as usual (see page 43)" RCP 8.5 scenario.

The meaning of the "5%", "50%", and "95%" designations is that there is a 5% chance, a 50% chance, and a 95% chance that the cumulative emissions in the 21st century will be less than the values given.

My 50% probability value was 712 GtC. The Wigley and Raper 50% probability value is 1385 GtC, and the RCP 8.5 "business as usual" is 1932 GtC. Current emissions are about 10GtC per year. If they plateau at this value for the next 10 years, then fall linearly to zero emissions in 2100, the total emissions for this century will be about 600 GtC...very close to my 712 GtC value, and miles away from the Wigley and Raper 1385 GtC value and the RCP 8.5 "business as usual value" of 1932 GtC.

In other words, I'm basically right, and they are way, way wrong. No surprise there. 

P.S. What is surprising to me is that the Wigley and Raper paper was published in Science magazine, and it predicts that there is less than 1 in 20 chance (i.e., a 5% probability) that emissions in the 21st century will be more than 713 GtC. Why was this obviously wrong analysis never corrected? Isn't Science interested in...I don't know...science? Perhaps even more surprising is how in 2009 the RCP 8.5 scenario, with emissions of 1932 GtC, was labeled as "business as usual" and the so-called "scientific community" has never corrected that obvious nonsense.

Recalculating Worldwide Computing Power

 I previously speculated on why economic growth in the 21st century will be spectacular..My calculations then were based on sales of personal computers and the expected power of each personal computer. It wasn't a very sophisticated analysis, so I was happy to recently learn of this great paper that estimates the total power of graphical processing units (and central processing units) in the world.

That paper calculated the total processing power of all GPUs in 2007 to be 6.4 x 10^18 instructions per second, and that the rate was increasing by 86 percent per year. I translated that into human brain equivalents (HBEs) by assuming that one HBE was equal to 20 quadrillion instructions per second (20 petaflops, or 20,000 teraflops) or 100 trillion instructions per second (0.1 petaflops, or 100 teraflops). The value of 20 petaflops comes from Ray Kurzweil's work, will the value of 100 teraflops was proposed by Hans Moravec.

Anyway, the graph below has two straight lines for those two cases, and one curved line, which represents the results of my earlier calculations. The bottom line is that the curved line representing my earlier calculation is very, very close to the result from the paper, assuming that one HBE is equal to 20 petaflops (20 quadrillion instructions per second). Another bottom line is that we're talking about some pretty stunning numbers very soon. For example, by 2025, the number of HBEs from computers (even using the 20 petaflops value) is approximately 1 billion. And 

A bet offer to Anders (of "ATTP")

I was having a discussion with Anders of the blog And Then There's Physics. He claims that the statement "that future anthropogenic emissions would need to be eliminated in order to stabilize global-mean temperatures" is true.

I'm challenging him to put his money where his mouth is. I bet him the equivalent of 30 U.S. dollars that I can honestly answer the following multiple choice question, and he cannot:

Which of the following statements must be true, in order for global temperatures to be stabilized:

1) Anthropogenic emissions must be eliminated.
2) If anthropogenic emissions are not eliminated, then we must somehow remove as much CO2 from the atmosphere, and sequester it somewhere, as we’re emitting into the atmosphere.
3) Both of the above.

My honest answer to this question is "#2."

If Anders can honestly answer this multiple choice question, I will give him $30.

Jobs vulnerable to artificial intelligence, part 2

I previously posted on the jobs that I think are most vulnerable to artificial intelligence (computers, robots). Here's a table with the number of workers (in millions) in each of the top 15 job categories in 2012, and my predictions for what the employment will be in each of those categories in 2024, 2034, and 2044. I think the two jobs most vulnerable to artificial intelligence are cashiers and truck drivers; I expect about a 90% reduction in their numbers from 2012 to 2044. Other jobs I see as particularly vulnerable are bookkeepers/accountants and material movers (e.g. loading dock workers). But I don't see even one of the top 15 job categories in 2012 as gaining workers by 2044. And overall, I expect about a 50%(!) drop in the number of people in the U.S. employed in the top jobs of 2012 by the year 2044.

Robin Hanson recently had a blog post with the title, "This time isn't different"...relating how previous predictions of job losses due to computers and other machines didn't come to pass. I beg to differ. I think this time most certainly is different. That's because this time we're talking about computers/robots very shortly (in the next 1-2 decades) generally equaling then surpassing the capabilities of a human brain and body.  

Popularity, 2012	Job	Employment relative to 2012 (i.e., 2012 = 1.0)					Percent Change, 2012 - 2044
		2012	2024	2034	2044
1	Retail   Salespeople	1	0.95	0.48	0.29		-71
2	Cashiers	1	0.88	0.53	0.12		-88
3	Office   Clerks	1	0.93	0.71	0.50		-50
4	Fast   food prep and service	1	1.04	0.89	0.59		-41
5	RNs	1	1.00	1.00	0.88		-12
6	Waiters/waitresses	1	1.04	0.78	0.52		-48
7	Customer   Reps	1	1.05	1.00	0.91		-9
8	Material   movers (e.g., loading docks)	1	1.00	0.62	0.14		-86
9	Janitors	1	1.05	0.57	0.19		-81
10	Stock   clerk, order filler	1	1.16	1.26	0.84		-16
11	Secretaries	1	1.06	0.94	0.83		-17
12	Bookkeeping,   accounting	1	1.00	0.56	0.22		-78
13	General   managers	1	1.00	0.94	0.88		-12
14	Tractor   trailer truck drivers	1	1.06	0.56	0.06		-94
15	Elementary   school teachers	1	1.00	0.87	0.53		-47
Totals	Top 15 jobs in   2012	1	1.00	0.76	0.48		-52

Postscript (11/10/15): I should have made it clear that all of these predictions are population-weighted. For example, I have employment in 2044, relative to 2012, for all top 15 jobs, as 0.48 (i.e., a 52% reduction in the number of total jobs in all 15 sectors). But that's a population-weighted number. For example, suppose the total U.S. population increases by 20 percent from 2012 to 2044. Therefore, a population-weighted value of 0.48 would actually look like 1.2 x 0.48 = 0.58. So if the population increases by 20 percent, the absolutely number of jobs would be 0.58 times the 2012 value, rather than 0.48 times the 2012 value. Of course, if the population didn't change at all from 2012 to 2044, the 0.48 value would be appropriate to calculate the total number of jobs relative to 2012.

"Citizen Scientists" of the world: Seriously, the emperor is naked

Most folks know the story of The Emperor's New Clothes. It ends when the innocent little boy says the truth, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" Then all the people are no longer scared to admit the truth, and they acknowledge the emperor is indeed naked, and everyone lives happily ever after. (Except the emperor's two weavers, who die mysteriously of radiation poisoning a few months later.)

But I propose a different, "Fractured Fairy Tales" ending, in which the people shout down the boy: "You don't know what you're talking about! Look at the weave! It's extraordinary!" The boy then tries several more times to demonstrate why the emperor is indeed naked (such as describing moles in private places). The people then shout that the boy is a Clothing Denier. And the boy eventually shrugs and gives up.

I've had a similar experience recently, trying to point out John Cook's (and others') misrepresentation of the paper, "Quantifying the Consensus on Global Warming." Specifically John Cook wrote, in a later published paper, "Of the 4,014 abstracts that expressed a position on the issue of human-induced climate change, Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause."

This is an absolutely blatant misrepresentation of the paper. To put it more bluntly, John Cook is lying. There is simply no way on earth that, "Of the 4,014 abstracts that expressed a position on the issue of human-induced climate change, Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause."

To get into details, the paper has 7 categories, and here are the number of abstracts in the various categories:

(1) Explicit endorsement with quantification = 64 abstracts.

(2) Explicit endorsement without quantification = 922 abstracts.

(3) Implicit endorsement = 2910 abstracts.

(5) Implicit rejection = 54 abstracts.

(6) Explicit rejection without quantification = 15 abstracts.

(7) Explicit rejection with quantification = 9 abstracts.

Category (4) isn't presented above, because only Categories 1-3 and 5-7 are important to the paper. There are 3896 abstracts in Categories 1-3 and 78 abstracts in Categories 5-7, adding up to a total of 3974 abstracts. Then there were 40 abstracts rated as "uncertain" with respect to anthropogenic global warming ("AGW").

The main point is that Cook et al. get the "over 97%" of abstracts by summing all the papers in Categories 1 to 3. However, of those first 3 categories, only "Category 1" truly fits the characterization as "...the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause." So only 64 out of the 4,014 abstracts meet that characterization.

To see how much abstracts in Category 3 do not meet the characterization of, "...the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause" one simply needs to read a few abstracts in Category 3. For example, there's the abstract: Is the extent of glaciation limited by marine gas-hydrates?

"Methane may have been released to the atmosphere during the Quaternary from Arctic shelf gas-hydrates as a result of thermal decomposition caused by climatic warming and rising sea-level; this release of methane (a greenhouse gas) may represent a positive feedback on global warming [Revelle, 1983; Kvenvolden, 1988a; Nisbet, 1990]. We consider the response to sea-level changes by the immense amount of gas-hydrate that exists in continental rise sediments, and suggest that the reverse situation may apply—that release of methane trapped in the deep-sea sediments as gas-hydrates may provide a negative feedback to advancing glaciation. Methane is likely to be released from deep-sea gas-hydrates as sea-level falls because methane gas-hydrates decompose with pressure decrease. Methane would be released to sediment pore space at shallow sub-bottom depths (100's of meters beneath the seafloor, commonly at water depths of 500 to 4,000 m) producing zones of markedly decreased sediment strength, leading to slumping [Carpenter, 1981; Kayen, 1988] and abrupt release of the gas. Methane is likely to be released to the atmosphere in spikes that become larger and more frequent as glaciation progresses. Because addition of methane to the atmosphere warms the planet, this process provides a negative feedback to glaciation, and could trigger deglaciation."

There is nothing in this abstract that says, "The earth is warming up"...let alone that "human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause." The whole abstract (and paper) are about events that happened long before the Industrial Revolution!

Similarly, there is the abstract: On the nature of methane gas-hydrate dissociation during the Toarcian and Aptian Oceanic anoxic events.

The magnitude and timing of a major rapid negative carbon-isotope excursion recorded in marine and terrestrial matter through the Early Toarcian (Early Jurassic) and Early Aptian (Early Cretaceous) oceanic anoxic events (OAEs) have been proposed to be the result of large methane gas-hydrate dissociation events. Here, we develop and evaluate a global carbon-isotope mass-balance approach for determining the responses of each component of the exogenic carbon cycle (terrestrial biosphere, atmosphere and ocean). The approach includes a dynamic response of the terrestrial carbon cycle to methane-related CO₂ increases and climatic warming. Our analyses support the idea that both the Early Toarcian and Early Aptian isotopic curves were indicative of large episodic methane releases (∼5000 and ∼3000 Gt respectively) promoting warm ‘greenhouse’ conditions in the Mesozoic. These events are calculated to have increased the atmospheric CO₂ concentration by ∼900 and ∼600 ppmv respectively and land surface temperatures by 2.5° to 3.0°C. However, we show that much of the methane released from oceanic sediments is rapidly sequestered by terrestrial and marine components in the global carbon cycle, and this effect strongly attenuated the potential for ancient methane gas-hydrate dissociation events to act as major amplifiers in global warming. An increase in oceanic carbon sequestration is consistent with the deposition of globally distributed black shales during these OAEs. Our analyses point to the urgent need for high-resolution marine and terrestrial carbon-isotope records to better characterize the nature of the Toarcian and Aptian events and improve our interpretation of their consequences for the global carbon cycle.

Not only is this abstract about times before the Industrial Revolution, it's about times long before humanity even existed! But somehow, according to John Cook (and others), this abstract demonstrates that, "the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause." On the blog, "And Then There's Physics," I attempted to explain how the Cook et al. "Consensus" paper is being misrepresented by Cook et al. But the crowd there simply would not believe that the emperor had no clothes. They insisted they could see the clothes. Eventually, a boy has to say, "Whatever."

But the emperor is still naked, and John Cook et al. are still misrepresenting the results of their paper. Their paper most emphatically did not find that, "Of the 4,014 abstracts that expressed a position on the issue of human-induced climate change, ...over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause."

Do people of 2100 have a "right" to be "pretty angry" about global warming?

I made some comments about a post by Kerry Emanuel at the National Climate Change Forum. Andrew Dessler first commented:

John: here’s how I would look at the issue. Imagine you’re a citizen year 2100. If it turns out that the climate sensitivity is high and human society does nothing about it, then you would rightfully be pretty angry.

I responded as follows:

Andrew Dessler writes: “John: here’s how I would look at the issue. Imagine you’re a citizen year 2100.”

OK. Let’s imagine that. In the 20th century, worldwide GDP/income growth averaged about 2.3% per year. Let’s assume that continues. Therefore, as a citizen of the world in 2100, my income is approximately 7 times what it was for the citizens of the world in 2014. Let’s further assume that there are 10 billion of us in 2100 (a nice round and reasonable number). Therefore, our global income/GDP in 2100 is approximately 10 times higher than at present (7 times more GDP/income per person, and approximately 1.4 times as many people). Therefore, our global annual GDP is about $900 trillion (~10 times the 2014 value of $90, purchasing power parity basis), and our global income is about 80% of that, or $720 trillion.

Let’s further ...suppose that the global CO2 concentration is about 700 ppm, and this has resulted in a warming of 5 degrees Celsius relative to the year 2014. (Note that such warming seems extremely improbable, because *average* warming rate over the next 8 decades that’s more than 3 times the current rate.) Let’s further suppose that this warming of 5 degrees Celsius cuts the income/GDP-per-person for the citizen of 2100 from 7 times the value of the citizen of 2014 to 6 times the value of the citizen of 2014 (i.e., about a 14% reduction in income).

Suppose we citizens of 2100, suffering from a 14% reduction in our income due to global warming, decide to spend 20% our income on pulling CO2 from the atmosphere and injecting it underground (ambient air capture and sequestration). That 20% of our income would be $720 trillion times 0.86 (from a 14 percent reduction caused by the hypothesized 5 degrees Celsius global warming) times 0.20 (20 percent) = $124 trillion a year. One (pessimistic) estimate of the cost of ambient air capture and sequestration in 2012 was $1000 per metric ton of CO2 (http://www.pnas.org/content/108/51/20428.long). (Note that this paper also mentions other estimates for the current cost at “no more than a few hundred dollars per tonne of CO2 avoided.”) Since there are 2.13 gigatonnes of carbon per ppm of CO2 in the air, and 3.67 tonnnes of CO2 per tonne of carbon, the total cost to remove 1 ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere at $1000 per metric ton would be $7.8 trillion. So if we citizens of 2100 spent 20% of our income (i.e., $124 trillion per year) on ambient air CO2 removal and sequestration, we could remove about 16 ppm per year. Let’s say were adding 2 ppm a year at the time; therefore, we could only lower CO2 by 14 ppm per year. So how many years would it take us to get from 700 ppm down to the pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm? It would take us (700 – 280)/14 = 30 years.

At the end of that 30 years, assuming that GDP per capita continued to grow at 2.3% per year, and even assuming that we continued to lose 14% of our income to climate change damage and 20% of our income was spent on ambient CO2 removal and sequestration, our income would still be 6.8 times the income of the average citizen of 2014 (i.e. 1.4 times the average income of the citizen of 2100, which was 4.8 times the average income of the citizen of 2014).

Dr. Dessler continues, “If it turns out that the climate sensitivity is high and human society does nothing about it, then you would rightfully be pretty angry.”

How do we citizens of 2100 have any “right” to be “pretty angry?” We have an income that is 4.8 times higher than the average citizen of 2014. And that’s even *assuming* that there is 5 degrees Celsius of warming between now and 2100 (which is very unlikely to happen) and that such warming causes a 14% loss in income from climate damage, AND that we citizens of 2100 spend 20% of our incomes removing CO2 from the ambient air and sequestering it. Furthermore, by 2130, we average citizens will have an incomes that are 6.8 times higher than the average citizen of 2014, and will have lowered the ambient air CO2 concentration to the pre-industrial value of 280 ppm.

My comments are essentially a follow-up on posts I've made here on my blog that question the morality of sacrificing for the benefit of the people of 2100, since I think they'll be so much better off than the people of 2014. (Or they'll be waging and likely losing a war to super-intelligent terminators, and so will have much bigger worries than global warming.)

Related articles

Global warming is not "irreversible"

What is the Morality of the Less-Well-Off Sacrificing for the Better-Off?