I was a lead author on the climate report that won Al Gore the Nobel Prize. Here’s what we know now that we didn’t know then

BYDAVID SCHIMEL

November 15, 2022 at 4:51 AM CST

What if we have been looking at climate change totally wrong? What if our greatest existential fear could instead offer hope for a brighter future?

Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), going back to 1995, have set the stage for how we think about climate change. First, climate impacts were thought to be a gradual and slowly increasing set of problems that would be manageable by well-understood technological and management processes. Second, mitigation was thought to be expensive and damaging to the economy. By that way of thinking, climate change would on balance be expensive to prevent and only moderately damaging.

As such, much of the motivation to respond has been driven by nonmarket considerations such as equity, the preservation of the natural world, and other benefits that are hard to price. As a lead author of the second and third IPCC reports, I understand this framework of beliefs quite well. 

But what if these two core assumptions are wrong? What if the severity of climate change has been underestimated, and many of its harms are hard or impossible to adapt to? And what if the rate of potential technological progress is faster and the cost of alternative technologies cheaper than projected? 

Then the fundamental economic equation changes, and decarbonization could be inexpensive compared to damages—or even benefit the global economy.

We likely live in that world.

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