Three hundred plus pages of vital information.
I bought this book from Thriftbooks and was so fired up that I sat down and started reading it almost immediately. For as the back cover explains:
Climate change is profoundly altering our world in ways that pose major risks to human societies and natural systems. We have entered the Climate Casino and are rolling the global-warming dice, warns William Nordhaus. But there is still time to turn around and walk back out of the casino, and in this book the author explains how.
William Nordhaus
William Nordhaus is a brilliant economist as Fred Andrews describes above. Indeed he is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University and he has his website here.
Now I am going straight to two videos.
The first is William Nordhaus receiving the Nobel Prize in 2018.
And the second is that lecture given at the same venue in 2018.
Hopefully you got to watch them both!
Learning from Dogs 
Very interesting videos. I did not listen to the entire second video but I read his book.
He is certainly a genius. I read this book a few months ago and it was very interesting. At first it seems like he is downplaying the problem in his economic analysis. For example, he is considering the fact that technology and medicine is getting better. Whilst certain natural disasters are getting worse because of global warming, less people are dying from them because we are better at preventing casualties. The same goes for diseases like malaria, which will have a bigger spread and yet we will be better at preventing deaths and economic loss in the future. He is including discounting, meaning today’s money is worth a lot more. To prevent a loss of one million in 2050 you should not spend more than 200,000 to entirely prevent that loss. He is also not including things like species extinction and a few other things since you can’t put an economic value on it. He also considers that poor people dying is not as expensive as rich people dying, and it will be mostly poor people dying, thus less expensive.
Some people think he is underestimating the economic effects of global warming, whilst rightwing think tanks and articles in the Wall Street Journal interpreted it as him saying global warming is beneficial. He is especially stressing that the last interpretation is false, and he fought the Wall Street Journal over it. However, he is approaching his analysis this conservative way so that you cannot accuse him of exaggerating. This becomes clear in the second half of the book but is perhaps not clear in the first half of the book.
Anyway, I posted a review for his book on my website. You can find it under the menu item “All Posts” and then “Reviewing The Climate Casino by William D. Nordhaus”.
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Thomas, I have just read your reply a few minutes ago (it’s 5:12 PDT) on my iPad. It deserves a long response from me that will not take place for several more hours. My apologies!
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(Exactly as I posted on your blog a short time ago.)
Thomas, this is a very perceptive review of one of the best non-fiction books I have read in my lifetime (and I’m 79 in November). Prof. Nordhaus writes that the only way out of this mess is by putting a realistic price on carbon. The top five economies in the world are the USA, China, Japan, Germany and India with the UK coming in at six. What are the politicians/leaders of these countries doing today to make a difference today for all, I repeat ‘all’, of us across the planet? To my mind the answer is diddly-squat. Nothing in other words!
We do not have a great deal of time left. If I live another ten years and there still is nothing being done that is it!
I wish I was younger because I would be more active in shouting out the dangers that we are in. All I can do now is to applaud the efforts of others and, perhaps, republish stuff on my blog, Learning from Dogs that promotes this post and others who are also active in shouting out the dangers.
Well done, Thomas!
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Thank you so much for your kind words Paul. I think that both Germany and the UK has a carbon price, and I can add that Canada does too (even though it is not in the big six economies). We are waiting for the US, China, India, Australia, Russia. So even though it is not enough some countries are acting. Sweden has a very strong carbon price and a fossil fuel free grid (well less than 2%). So it is not all hopeless. I really appreciate you speaking out on this issue since it is close to my heart as well. I want a good planet for my upcoming grand children (I don’t have any yet).
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Thank you, Thomas. Well my daughter and son-in-law have a son. He is Morten and he is now 12 years old. Jean and I had them visit us a couple of months ago and, boy-oh-boy, Morten is one bright spark! Jean and I are very, very fond of him. My son and his partner do not have any children. Morten is exactly the person that Prof. Nordhaus is thinking of! Keep in touch!
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That is wonderful. You are so right, that’s the ones Professor Nordhaus is thinking of.
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Or if you want the exact link to that post here it is
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