[redpoint5]

I don't need to look into anything to know it's all contrived. When dieselgate came out, the corrupt "stats" guys come up with nonsense like cheating caused a billion excess deaths or some absurd number. I don't have to be a mathmagician to instantly see that 1.4 trillion is a fictional number. I'm to believe that more than 5% of the total US gross domestic product depends on lake Mead? Lotta BS going on there. Had they not gotten so greedy with their made up number, it might not have instantly triggered my BS filter.

I'm not saying there are no negative externalities, only that they can't be monetized in any meaningful way. How much is someone wrongfully killed worth? Those sorts of things require the law to come up with some figure, but it doesn't really have anything to do with reality...

...which always brings me back to the point that a very broad measure of well-being is the most accurate way, not some myopic and corrupt statistician deciding what is relevant for consideration and how to value them. If I hired a numbers guy to make the argument that global warming has had a positive economic impact, we'd unsurprisingly see numbers making that claim.

Even if we could somehow be certain warming was a net economic negative due to less snow melt being captured by lake Mead, it's still meaningless because it wouldn't account for the all of the heating costs offset in the entire rest of the world.

As I said, this is global warming, not lake Mead warming. I can't care if there's some localized badness happening if globally everyone is thriving.