Uncle Bob
There’s actually a relationship between predicting the weather and predicting climate change. It’s sort of like the relationship between predicting an economy versus predicting the price of certain stocks next week.
Both weather and stock predictions are short horizon and very sensitive to tiny nudges, then the chaos takes over and you’re on your own.
Both climate change modelling and economic modelling focus on quasi-equilibrium kinetics in which the impact of chaos is smoothed out.
They don’t even pretend to be able to predict any specific short term outcomes. Except of course the Paris target when the politicians got involved.
Our coalition party are convinced we will tank the economy with climate change action. Which is ironic because they clearly don’t understand either economic modelling or climate change modelling.
If they did, they’d understand that any structural investment in any change always improves the economy. It can be war, large infrastructure projects or net zero; same outcome. The mechanism is the same. Governments inject demand at scale, firms invest, labour tightens, productivity lifts, and, Uncle Bob.
The Nationals, on a fairness basis (why put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage?), propose pegging Australia’s emissions reduction efforts to the OECD average which is about half the pace of the nation’s current trajectory.
If we did that we wouldn’t get any economic benefit because that doesn’t involve changing anything. Ironic how it works.
offshore westerly 