"Climate Economics: What Do We Know about Unknown Risks?"

This talk continues of the Department of Environmental Health's seminar series, "Climate Change: Science, Health, and Policy." The "known," near-term costs of climate change are becoming more serious, with the growing frequency of extreme weather events, losses in agriculture, and destruction of coastal property. The longer-term, often unknown risks remain even more ominous, challenging conventional ways of thinking about discounting, obligations to the future, responses to low (but nonzero) probabilities of catastrophic losses, and the cost-benefit paradigm for policymaking. In this seminar Dr. Ackerman discusses what a new economic analysis would need to include, in order to respond to the true magnitude of the global climate crisis.