Global Warming = More Camping

by Patrick Appel

Manzi tallies points in his recent climate change to-and-fro with Bradford Plumer et al. I missed Mike Konczal's contribution until just now. He notes that Nordhaus tried to calculate non-GDP consequences of global warming by comparing how much the population enjoys skiing (which warming will decrease) and camping (which warming will increase):

There’s something kind of oddly endearing to framing the future of how much carbon we are willing to put in the air and how much warming we are willing to experience as a population based on camping versus skiing time surveys from 1981. For this cost-benefit analysis to work, we need to quantify everything, and the moment we step outside the world of the welfare of international industrial production to the world of our bodies and our lives the methods break down.