Nov 22 (Reuters) – Ahead of international climate talks in Dubai this month, economists are updating estimates of the impact of global warming on the world economy, sometimes calculating down to a decimal place the hit to output in decades to come.
But detractors say those numbers are the product of economic models that are not fit to capture the full extent of climate damage. As such, they can provide an alibi for policy inaction.
Record temperatures, droughts, floods and wildfires this year have caused billions of dollars of damage, even before emissions take warming beyond the 2015 Paris Agreement cap of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
