Comments GSchmidt has made

What do we measure?

It's interesting: When you try to measure and compare the happiness of different peoples, for example, your epistemology, methods, etc. are immediately questioned.
When it comes to the economy, the question is only growth or no-growth. What we measure, how we measure economic growth is strongly based on (historically-grown) conventions.
If we decided to base our measure of "the economy" to include nature (in economic terms: internalize externalities, factor in ecosystem services, just for two obvious missing pieces) and we would probably have negative economic growth right now, and positive/real growth with development towards sustainability...

Dr. Gerald Schmidt Positive Ecology Project www.positive-ecology.org

Continually amazed....

... by the parochialism.
Okay, this time around, the snow in Baghdad was mentioned in support of the "it's cold, now wouldn't you care for some of that global warming."
Where I now live in the Baltics, it's been the warmest winter (as in the season) since something like 1928, February has hardly seen any snow.
Back in Austria, this season has brought snow (as opposed to the winter before), and immediately there is less reporting about possible challenges of climate change to skiing industry. However, föhn winds had also brought temperatures up to +15 centigrade, quite a few times.
We had "the one" big storm for this decade (so it sounded in news) in 2007... then January of this year brought "Paula," March brought "Emma"...
I wouldn't say it's global warming, but it sure is different.

Dr. Gerald Schmidt Positive Ecology Project www.positive-ecology.org

Exactly my point...

... except that an "objective" economic analysis á la Lomborg's cost-benefit on climate change seems not to know that to most people, (their) lives are pretty valuable. Even if "lifetime productivity" in merely economic terms may be low...
Staying within that perspective, you could say that the death of such a poor person, who can't replace even the little they lost, doesn't matter much to "the economy."
(And in some cases, they may actually be in a better position: As Jaret Diamond pointed out, if a global crisis hits, his New Guinean indigenous friends would, by and large, just go on as they always have, replacing stone axe with stone axe, hut with hut...)

But, is this really the way we want to see things, the future we see for humanity?

Your point about the "poor rich" points to what I'm trying mainly to work on: When environmentalists tell them, e.g. "they should contribute more," it seems they hear that they should just give up the little they (and actually, I feel it's a "we") have been able to get (and the poor want to get, finally). Who'd want that?
What get's overlooked is that - hopefully - you could "contribute more" in other ways, by which you gain in quality of life / well-being, so that - just as you are saying, "no one loses."

Dr. Gerald Schmidt Positive Ecology Project www.positive-ecology.org

Climate Change Costs

Agriculture is only 3% of the global economy, so climate change impacts on agriculture are not all that important.

By the same token, I wonder if the people who argue that climate change will hit the poor the worst might not be mistaken:
If your economic productivity is hardly much (you build your shed from whatever you can find, grow much of your own food, or sell very little - or yourself - to buy food), if you lose that, it doesn't hurt "the economy" much either.
If you are rich and you get struck, you lose a lot and your high productivity gets adversely affected...
So, the rich lose out.
Unless, of course:
a) you count the money the rich may still have and now will have to spend on repairs and the like as a contribution to the economy. Then, catastrophes are good for the economy (as good or even better than planned obsolescence, probably), or
b) you realize that
 - just as we first have to eat (ecosystem services typically count as 0% of global economy, agriculture is 3%, but it's that which we need in order to have the foundations for our very lives - and last I looked, "the economy" does not exist independently but is a catch phrase for people doing things such as agriculture, manufacture, trade,...) -
we also first ought to count human lives as intrinsically valuable, not just in terms of lifetime productivity.
Point "b" seems to be used when talking about the poor likely to suffer worst. But why, if economic cost-benefit analysis were what should supposedly guide us (nod to Lomborg and the "Copenhagen Consensus")?

Dr. Gerald Schmidt Positive Ecology Project www.positive-ecology.org

Little correction (?)

Very not important, but Sudan shall be getting a UN Peacekeeping Force, the UN Environment Programme would be headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya - it sounds like those two got mixed up?

Dr. Gerald Schmidt Positive Ecology Project www.positive-ecology.org