Two geoscientists and a philosopher from the University of Chicago(UChicago) estimated that an "ultimate cost of carbon" to humanitycomes out closer to 100,000 dollars per ton of carbon, a thousand times higherthan the 100 dollars or less routinely calculated for the cost to ourgeneration.
According to a news release posted on the university's website onWednesday, the researchers built a model that projected the effects of climatechange for hundreds of thousands of years. In that time, sea levels rise as icesheets melt, and storms and droughts get more intense.
Under this model, the cost of carbon that we burn today explodesto range from 10,000 dollars to 750,000 dollars per ton based on details of thegeophysical and economic scenarios. The researchers found a central value ofabout 100,000 dollars per ton.
"The ultimate costs are a thousand times higher than the morenormally calculated present-day value of those costs because climate changewill persist for a thousand times longer than our generation will," saidDavid Archer, a computational climate scientist at UChicago.
"If you lose 10 percent of your capacity to grow food, in ourmodel, you lose 10 percent of your population and economy," Archer said.
Current economic "social cost of carbon," pioneered byUChicago Professor Michael Greenstone as a number to represent the value of allfuture damages to our generation in today's dollars, calculates the differencebetween realistic projections of the economy with and without climate change,which typically comes out to 100 dollars or less per ton.
However, embedded into this calculation is a basic economicprinciple called the discount rate. Assuming the economy will continually growmeans that costs that will come due more than a hundred or so years into thefuture don't matter much to us today.
"What we wanted to get with this calculation is a bettersense of the burden we're placing on future generations," said Archer."This is not intended to be a realistic calculation of the present-dayvalue of costs, but it's our attempt to try to put the huge time scales intomore understandable units.
The study has been published in the journal Climactic Change.
Editor: Galia
