… you grasp onto a non-peer-reviewed study that puts forth the idea that hotter days are bad for the economy, then argues on the enthymematically flimsy basis of “if the world continues on its current path of greenhouse gas emissions [Premise A1], even warmer temperatures later this century will squeeze the U.S. economy by tens of billions of dollars each year [Conclusion],” with this as the final word:

The study uses 44 climate computer simulations to project temperatures near the end of the century rising by about 9 degrees on average.

That, it says, will reduce the nation’s economic growth by 0.12 percentage points a year. Reilly said that may sound small, but it is trillions of dollars over a century.

Such a finding is cause for action, the warming grail of an economic justification for applying ever-harsher regulatory clamps on the economy. About those, however …

… you avoid a peer-reviewed study that shows that the U.S. economy is already one-fourth the size it could be were it not for a federal regulatory regime increasing its power and scope:

Federal regulations added over the past 50 years have reduced real output growth by about 2 percentage points on average over the period 1949-2005. That reduction in the growth rate has led to an accumulated reduction in GDP of about $38.8 trillion as of the end of 2011.

That is, GDP at the end of 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of $15.1 trillion if regulation had remained at its 1949 level.

In fact, your answer to “saving” the economy from losing trillions from this (just for the sake of argument) 0.12 percent hypothesized annual loss due to “warming” would be to grow even further the cause of 2.0 percent annual loss. To save “trillions of dollars over a century,” you would force upon us tens of trillions upon tens of trillions of dollars’ lost over a century.

And the forcing would be worth how much cut in warming? Well, if we did everything — “reduced our emissions to zero” in the words of John Kerry — it would have an impact on global temperatures by century’s end of somewhere between zero and one-quarter degree Fahrenheit less warm. That’s if we did everything to stop emissions, meaning economically we did nothing productive but held a state-enforced “Hands Up/Don’t Breathe” die-in till Year 2100.

Note

1 The unstated leg of the syllogism (Premise B) would be “and if the conventional belief that manmade greenhouse gases are indeed causing global temperatures to increase,” which prefers to be left unsaid these days so as not to invite scrutiny on account of two decades’ worth of global temperatures not tracking at all with the theorized effects of the increasing greenhouse gas emissions; q.v. (the graphs are from March, meaning the period without global warming is even longer than shown):

RSS no global warming for 17+ years

RSS_Model_TS_compare_globe