THE ECONOMY AS A PHYSICS PROBLEM

University of Utah physicist Tim Garrett has published a study that approaches the economy and its relation to global warming as a physics problem — and comes to some controversial conclusions: that rising carbon dioxide emissions cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day.

This is an intruiging article ... and as an engineer, I’m tempted to put more trust in physics than I am in climate “scientists.” Garrett's model has a certain elegance about it, and I’ve found over my career that simple, elegant models – even wrong simple, elegant models - usually offer more insight into the fundamentals of a problem than do more complicated ones.

Link via Instapundit.