El autor opina que la resiliencia del sistema investigador español explica que no se haya producido un colapso generalizado de la investigación
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Unlike the estimation of other social costs of releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, one has been made that goes beyond the year 2100.
In this way, it is estimated that carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere will cost future generations $100,000 per ton, a thousand times more than what was calculated for our generation.
Generational costs
The study, carried out by two geoscientists and a philosopher from the University of Chicago, published in the journal Climatic Change, calculates the so-called “social cost of carbon”, a number intended to represent the value of all future damages to our generation in today's dollars.
This image shows changes in the thickness of Antarctic land ice measured by two satellites, one that ran between 2003 and 2009 and another that began in 2018.
The calculations take into account the full magnitude of sea level rise, which reduces, among other things, cropland. The final costs are a thousand times higher than the normally calculated present value of those costs because climate change will persist a thousand times longer than our generation, according to one of the authors, David Archer, computational climate scientist:
What we wanted to achieve with this calculation is a better idea of the burden we are imposing on future generations. This is not intended to be a realistic estimate of the present value of costs, but is our attempt to try to put the enormous time scales into more understandable units. Most people are not geologists, and even for us it's really hard to think about how long the changes we're making now are going to last.
The authors emphasized that the model is not intended to be an exact measurement, but rather to help people visualize the future. The costs are also added assuming that there is no economic growth in the current world.
Because it is impossible to reliably predict humanity's long-term future, we had to make unrealistic simplifying assumptions, such as that humanity lives in a stable state with a planet's carrying capacity without changes in technology.
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The news
The future cost of pollution: around $100,000 per ton of carbon
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
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