Lomborg is massively overconfident in his predictions but not exactly less wrong than the implicit mainstream view that the economic impacts will definitely be ruinous enough to justify expensive policies.
It’s very hard to know, the major problem is just that the existing climate econ models make so many simplifying assumptions that they’re near-useless except for giving pretty handwavy lower bounds on damage, especially when the worst risks to worry about are in correlated disasters and tail risks, and Lomborg makes the mistake of taking them completely literally. I discussed this at length a couple of years ago and John Halstead later wrote a book-length report on what the climate impacts literature can and can’t tell us.
Lomborg is massively overconfident in his predictions but not exactly less wrong than the implicit mainstream view that the economic impacts will definitely be ruinous enough to justify expensive policies.
It’s very hard to know, the major problem is just that the existing climate econ models make so many simplifying assumptions that they’re near-useless except for giving pretty handwavy lower bounds on damage, especially when the worst risks to worry about are in correlated disasters and tail risks, and Lomborg makes the mistake of taking them completely literally. I discussed this at length a couple of years ago and John Halstead later wrote a book-length report on what the climate impacts literature can and can’t tell us.