[stale2002]

Well, that is because things aren't literally apocalyptic.

The science says that sea levels will rise by a meter or so over the next hundred years. That won't end the world.

The science says that climate change will cause trillions of dollars of damages, over the next hundred years.

Trillions of dollars in damages is bad. But it is on the same scale of "badness" as another iraq war.

I'd want to prevent a third Iraq war, but I am not going to pretend that it would put billions of lives in danger.

[graeme]

Science can't predict the economic effects of such a change over a 100 year period. Economic forecasting just isn't that good.

That's also not the right way to look at Iraq war costs. A lot of the war cost is just "shuffling".

Eg pay $1,000,000 in soldier salaries, the money is moved from taxpayers to soldiers. Then the soldiers spend the money. What was lost?

The real cost is the alternative work the soldiers could have done. The private sector could presumably have put them to better use. This would be more acute if the economy had full employment.

Bombs and munitions are worse, as there is real destruction of material. But much of the money is still recycled back into the domestic economy.

By contrast, a trillion simply lost from a catastrophe is just lost. It's a loss of real infrastructure. It's a loss of whole cities such as Miami, etc

To speak of "science" in this context is to misuse the term.

[diggernet]

But a lot of the catastrophe cost is just "shuffling".

Eg pay $1,000,000 in construction worker salaries, the money is moved from taxpayers to workers. Then the workers spend the money. What was lost?

The comment about alternative work still applies, but much of the money is still recycled back into the domestic economy.

So it's not a trillion simply lost.

All in all, I think the comparison to war is very apt.

[graeme]

Real resources go into the building of those buildings though. You could have built other things, but instead you must rebuild new york.

Whereas, soldiers probably weren't doing much economically productive in the first place. And as long as there is spare capacity in the labour force, moving people from "unemployed" to "soldier" isn't a massive misallocation of resources.

It's not nothing - taxpayers could habe spent the money better had they kept it. But it's not the same as if you levelled a city.

Further, the vast bulk of costs associated with the iraq war are interest on debt. That is really just shuffling money around. Especially if the debt is held by americans.

Money is just a unit of exchange. It isn't synonymous with wealth itself. Climate change will actually directly destroy wealth: it will level capital stock, it will lower crop yields, etc.

This is very different from movements of money back and forth that leave the physical economy untouched.

Iraq suffered destruction of capital during the Iraq war. Not sure if a dollar figure was attached to it, but that would be a more comparable situation.

Iraq's economy is $200 billion per year. I'm guessing the dollar loss to them was much less than 2.4 trillion. And yet I'm sure the real hardship caused by capital loss is greater than americans feel from their financial loss - even if you account for population size differences.

[stale2002]

It is still not literal end if the world. We destroyed lots of cities in Iraq. That didn't end the world.

Yes, hundreds of thousands died. But not billions. Not even close. That's the only point I am making.

[sailfast]

The main difference here is that the Iraq war was funded by the government. The trillions of dollars for climate change will be put on homeowners, property owners, businesses, localities, etc and will be used to replace something, rather than be transferred. Further, for places where building dikes / walls are practical, that money will have to come from somewhere and I just don't know where that is right now.

I very much doubt the Federal government will be providing (or will have the funds to provide) much of the assistance required to mitigate this kind of rise, and it will come down to cities / states handling it themselves for a lot of this.

As for the lives in danger - I was considering this in terms of economic damage to the NE United States, but I'd imagine globally it could be on the scale of millions having to migrate / move.

I would not personally equate the impacts of climate change to the Iraq war because of the overall scale and global impact, but I understand how it compares in terms of order of magnitude for a mental model.