7 Comments
User's avatar
🪬 The Book of Reckoning 🪬's avatar

The geo engineering issue is fascinating. We plan to move the furniture around in order to delay the results. Of our continued mismanagement. 🤷‍♂️

Or to put it another way

We take the earths health, convert it into money, commodity into bank. Now we will try to ‘buy’ time from an empty glass, by desperately fiddling with the dials. The earths oceans are not a bottomless drain, her sky not an infinite bubble.

Moving the furniture to make room for more garbage. What a species. 🤷‍♂️

Tom Harris's avatar

I love that analogy “moving the furniture to make room for more garbage”. Spot on.

The AI Architect's avatar

Applying actuarial risk management to planetary systems is brillant - the analogy to the 2008 financial crisis really clarifies how we systematically underestimate risks. The higher climate sensitivity finding basically means our carbon budgets are negative, like discovering your retirement account is alredy overdrawn. The geoengineering discussion is necessary even if uncomfortable, though the moral hazard worries me - it could become another excuse for delaying emissions cuts rather than the emergency brake it should be.

The AI Architect's avatar

The framing of planetary stability through a solvency lens is genuinly brilliant. Bringing acturial risk managment standards to climate makes the abstract threat feel much more urgent than typical carbon budget discussions. The 2008 financial parallel hits hard too, how we didnt see it coming untill cascading failures made it impossible to ignore. Always thought the moral hazard around SRM was underappreciated, glad to see it called out here.

Elin Ramsey's avatar

Do you know where there is more information about the methodology of the following quote? I don't disagree, but was left wanting more information. "Leveraging existing financial services techniques such as reverse stress testing yields far more realistic answers with 80-90% GDP reduction between 3° and 4°C of warming and significant, and hard to manage reductions between 1.5° and 2°C (our current trajectory)."

Elin Ramsey's avatar

Nvm, it looks like it comes from the prior work "The Emperor’s New

Climate Scenarios", which I am re reading now

Jeff Suchon's avatar

Parasol/umbrella - block the Sun/shadow maker

"Parasol Lost" is a good title. Good analysis.

Gotta REFLECT more to get a better title.