From NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/everydaylife/climate_class.html

 

 

The Wentworth Group today released the report Will climate change cost us the earth via a highly readable and hard hitting address to the Green Capital Conference by Peter Cosier, a founding member of the group, who maintains Australia's strong economy and quality of living could be maintained with minimal change, even with a 60% cut in carbon emissions. In his acknowledgment he states, "This paper was prepared with advice from Dr Steve Hatfield Dodds, CSIRO Economist and President of the Australian Society of Ecological Economics."

Mr Cosier said on ABC radio this morning :

More than a decent quality of living, we can continue the spectacular economic growth that we've seen in Australia over the last century going on into the next century and we can do so, and at the same time stabilise the world's climate system.

We can stabilise the world's climate by the end of this century and still have average per capita incomes in this country of something in the order of $177,000 a year, and that's in today's money.

If we continue the economic growth as predicted by our treasury, then we will have by the end of this century something like $185,000 per year per person (blue curve below ^_____ ).

That's if we do nothing about carbon emissions on the assumption that climate change won't cause any economic damage.

These figures prove that this is not a contest between economic growth and environment. It's not a left or right-wing issue - it's a moral choice (red curve shows per capita income if there is a 60% reduction in carbon emission ^_____ ).

Peter Cosier leaves little doubt about his view of responsibility when he says:

The surprise is how little economic growth we’d need to sacrifice to minimise the impacts of climate change. Climate change is not a conflict between economic growth and the environment. It’s a contest of values, on whether we are prepared to take responsibility for the future or whether we simply vacate the space and leave our future to the vested interests of today.
 

Destroying nature and risking our climate for the sake of an insignificant amount of economic growth is not heroic – it is greed and it puts at risk everything we have built.

And he concludes with this footnote:

Footnote: The estimated impact of policy action presented in this paper is based on the results from eleven international models, reported by Grubb et al 2006. Nine of the eleven models indicate emission reductions are likely to result a GDP gap -1% or less relative to levels without emissions reductions by 2050. A number of models indicate no impact (a zero GDP gap), and two suggest economic gains, reflected in higher rates of economic growth with emission reductions, due to factors such as enhanced productivity from more rapid turnover of energy-related physical capital. Results from these nine models are more dispersed in the second half of the century, with GDP gaps ranging from +3.5 to -3.0 percent, with most between 0 and -1%. The estimate presented assumes the GDP gap rises to -1.5 by 2100. The impact on Australia is assumed to be three time the world average, implying a GDP of -3% by 2050, rising to -4.5% by 2100. This ratio is more conservative than the impact ratios suggested by ABARE (2006), which generally indicates impacts on Australia that are around twice the average world impact.
 

The Stern Report finds that temperature increases are likely to have non-linear impacts on living standards, with increases on 2^oC above pre-industrial levels reducing per capita economic income by around 1.5%, and increases of 4^oC reducing incomes by around 6%. Applying these estimates to Australia suggests GDP per capita with policy action with be higher than without action from around 2080 – if we assume Australian policy action is three times more costly than the world average. If we assume policy action is 1.5 times as costly, policy action results in higher incomes from 2055.