Past greenhouse gas emissions will cost global economy trillions | Stanford Report. Really!

Shocking! Even the Stanford University promotes such nonsense!

Not enough, Nature journal published this dubious research! There is at least a 50 years long history in Western countries of dubious calculations of environmental damages. It is e.g. a cherry picking exercise much liked by biased scientists!

What about e.g. global population growth? What about China?

"In brief

• Researchers developed a new framework for calculating “loss and damage,” or harms from climate change that countries can’t prevent by cutting emissions or avoid through adaptation.
• U.S. emissions since 1990 have caused more than $10 trillion in global economic damages, with roughly a third of the damage hitting the country’s own GDP.
• Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a potential alternative to compensation for damages caused, but becomes much less effective if action is delayed [???].

..."

From the abstract:

"Climate change is causing measurable harm globally. Political and legal efforts seek to link these damages with specific emissions, including in discussions of loss and damage (L&D); however, no quantitative definition of L&D exists, nor is there a framework to link past and future emissions from specific sources to monetized, location-specific damages.

Here we develop such a framework, which is integrated with recent efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon. Using empirical estimates of the non-linear relationship between temperature and aggregate economic output, we show that future damages from past emissions—one component of L&D—are at least an order of magnitude larger than historical damages from the same emissions.

For instance, one tonne of CO2 emitted in 1990 caused US$180 in discounted global damages by 2020 ($40–530) and will cause an additional $1,840 through 2100 ($500–5,700).

Thus, settling debts for past damages will not settle debts for past emissions.

In other illustrative estimates, a single long-haul flight per year over the past decade leads to about $25k ($6,000–77,000) in future damages by 2100, and US emissions since 1990 caused $500 billion ($180–1,300 billion) of damage in India and $330 billion ($110–820 billion) in Brazil. Carbon removal offers an alternative to transfer payments for settling L&D, but is increasingly ineffective in limiting damages as the delay between emission and recapture increases."

Past greenhouse gas emissions will cost global economy trillions | Stanford Report "Future climate damages from past emissions dwarf the economic harm already inflicted, a new study shows."

Quantifying climate loss and damage consistent with a social cost of carbon (open access)