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1. Climate change is already here and is causing significant impacts

The global mean temperature is already more than one degree C (about 2 degrees F) warmer than before the Industrial Revolution. Almost all of that increase has been in the 20th and 21st centuries with a disproportionately large amount since 1980. Climate change is already leading to the loss of tens to hundreds of thousands of human lives, tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of economic and property damage per year around the world – which would not have happened without a supercharged atmosphere. The climate crisis is also deeply interwoven with (but certainly not the sole culprit of) the current ecological crisis. There are many lines of evidence for this premise.

2. Climate change is largely attributable to human behavior

The climate change we have observed in the 20th and 21st centuries is largely the byproduct of human industrial activity, modern transportation, HVAC systems for buildings, modern farming and livestock cultivation processes. Again, there are many lines of evidence for this – see points made on the connection between human behavior and greenhouse gases.

3. Climate change will grow worse in the near-moderate future

It is a virtual certainty that climate change will grow worse in the next 30-50 years – although there is some uncertainty regarding by how much and what the long term future holds. Despite the advances in alternative energies and the growing numbers of people who care about the environment and are trying to be proactive on the matter, global GHG emission rates continue to rise, rather than slow or stop and the residence time of most greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is quite long. There was a slight dip in emissions because of COVID and there have at times been slower periods of GHG emissions growth connected to global recessions. But the long term trend is very clear.

4. The impacts of climate change are disproportionately felt by the poor and vulnerable

While individual events may be exceptions to this narrative, on balance, death and injury tolls from recent climate extreme events are consistently higher (relative to population and in absolute terms) in the poorer countries than in the richer countries. Relatedly, while the total nominal economic damage wrought by climate extremes in recent years may be somewhat higher in affluent countries than in poorer countries (because wealthier countries have more economic value exposed to climate risks), the economic damage relative to the economic means of poorer countries (share of GDP) is often much higher. Again there are many lines of evidence for this premise.

5. Poor countries have contributed very little to historical emissions, relative to wealthy countries

One of the countries most vocal in pushing for the creation of the loss and damage fund at COP27 was Pakistan which experienced catastrophic, devastating floods in the Indus River valley in 2022 and now has the 5th highest global population at well over 200 million (recently overtaking Brazil – translating to almost 3% of world population). Despite it’s large population, Pakistan is responsible for only a fraction of 1% of historical emissions. By contrast, the US with 5% of the world’s population is historically responsible for over a quarter of global historical GHG emissions. Given the evidence, there is a strong justice-oriented argument that wealthier nations do owe compensation to poorer countries for this imbalance of responsibility for causing the problem and for this imbalance of impact.

6. Weaning ourselves off of fossil fuel energy will be very difficult and will take a long time

Fossil fuels are not only the form of energy around which our global economy has developed its infrastructure (leading to issues of inertia and dependence), but fossil fuels are also very convenient for many applications (fossil fuels are energy dense, easily transportable and do not suffer the intermittency and storage issues of wind or solar). Globally, fossil fuels are responsible for about 80% of the energy we consume – and the world’s human population consumes A LOT of energy – almost 600 exajoules per year in recent years (exajoule = 10¹⁸ joules). Even though alternative energies are now cost competitive with fossil fuels, there are still massive challenges ahead with scaling up, storing and distributing renewable derived energy, and redesigning our infrastructure to make optimal use of non-fossil fuel energy.

7. More energy consumption is highly correlated to higher wealth and quality of life

While there are some individual exceptions to this narrative, historically, there is a very strong positive correlation between energy consumption and wealth and length and quality of life – which has thus far, more than compensated for losses from extreme climate events. This strong positive correlation between energy consumption and wealth/quality of life drives a lot of human behavior and leads people in poorer countries to very understandably want more access to energy, so they can have a higher quality of life. It is unfair and unreasonable for people in the affluent world to expect those in poor countries to not aspire to a higher standard of living (and therefore more energy consumption).

8. Human political systems and psychology are poorly designed to address climate change, but better designed to think about shorter term and more local problems

The climate change problem is a collective action problem on a massive scale. Human political systems and indeed human psychology are poorly designed to address such large scale, long term, problems and are much more adapted to temporally and geographically immediate threats. This tendency has evolutionary origins and has been entrenched into many human institutions. Ordinary people need to be part of climate change solutions but have other higher priorities: making their ends meet or dealing with war, inflation, job losses, health crises, etc.. These more immediate concerns will make climate change always seem like a lower priority.

In order to come up with “solutions” that work in the real world, we need to connect “climate change” solutions to existing problems that can be framed as more urgent and local. Urgent and local problems can sometimes motivate productive solutions. But while the “global” framing of climate change is not “intellectually wrong”, it has been a hindrance to progress and has brought about a lot of backlash from those who don’t have a “globalist perspective” or who are concerned with “government overreach”.

9. International climate negotiations have been (and will continue to be) dominated by countries acting in their own interest

Despite points 1-5, because of points 6, 7 and 8, international climate negotiations (especially the COP) have generally been dominated by national delegations that put their own countries’ interests first and humanity’s collective interests second. There is every reason to believe this will continue and it is why the outcomes of the COP process have so often been largely empty rhetoric and why the COP process has utterly failed to limit GHG emissions, despite the growing urgency of the problem and the growing community of people who care about the issue around the world.

10. Funding meaningful climate adaptation activities and damage compensation may not be as expensive as some fear and will probably be less expensive than dealing with the consequences of unaddressed climate change

The actual amount of money discussed as a benchmark for a Climate Loss and Damage fund is actually not that much in a global context. And the lack of enforcement mechanisms imply that making commitments and fulfilling them has an even lower financial cost (although of course there are always reputational and perception costs for politicians who are actually in a position to make these decisions). The affluent world has already failed by several tens of billions of dollars a year to deliver on a promise to provide $100 billion/year to the poorer world to address adaptation needs Nature article.

To first order the world’s GDP is about 100 trillion USD/year. The US economy is about a quarter of the total. The EU is another 15-20% of the total, as is the Chinese economy. If the EU and US funded 100 billion dollars a year of monetary transfers and/or insurance to the poor world, this would represent about 0.2% of their economies or about $200 annual cost for a person with an income of $100,000 (slightly more than one standard Netflix subscription). And yet, the perception by many on the American political right is that this is still too high a cost.

It should also be noted that doing nothing, or very little, to help poorer communities and societies adapt to climate change is still a choice, even though human psychology may not be well-designed to perceive “inaction” as a choice. This appears to be the choice we are making as a global society and it will have its own costs. When people who are already poor and marginalized because of other global forces face additional risks and hardships from climate extremes and do not have adequate support from the global community to help them, they will do a number of predictable things with larger societal costs:

1. become ill or injured, placing greater strain on health care systems
2. lose their livelihoods, damaging the economy and increasing the need for social and economic support
3. resort to forms of employment which may be hazardous to their health and/or damaging to the environment and may be unsustainable
4. lose their homes, leading to an increase in homelessness and strain on other services
5. become refugees – leading to increased migration burdens (both internally and between countries)

Clearly, a human/compassion based argument can certainly be made for greater funding for adaptation and resilience. But a more self-interested economic argument can also be made that the costs of these foreseeable disruptions may be greater than the cost of helping these vulnerable communities with their adaptation and resilience needs up front.