There are countless examples of people who clearly deserved to win or share a Nobel but were overlooked by the committee. But can anyone think of a hard-science laureate who arguably should not have won?
Note the "hard science" qualification -- obviously the Peace and Literature prizes have a controversial history, but disregard those for the moment.
I mean, the most obvious would be António Egas Moniz. His discovery that got him the Nobel for Medicine both didn't work and caused so much preventable illness, injury, and death that it is actually banned in many countries.
So a 4-degree temperature rise will wipe out 100% of world GDP, using Keen's math? It's hard to see how his modeling is any better than the work he's criticizing.
The question was "pray tell are your objections to the economic theory behind the DICE models?" Which Keen's essay addresses.
Addressing the shifted goalposts in your "by Keen's math" follow-up: if you're referring to the "rational function" introduced before the fourth-to-last paragraph, note what the context is:
A model that only applies in conditions where it is not needed, when you don’t have an alternative when it is needed, is worse than useless. ... This can easily be illustrated by replacing Nordhaus’s quadratic with a very similar one that does have tipping points.
And Keen specifically chooses a tipping point of +4°C, based on the paper Nordhaus himself cites and Nordhaus's admission that business as usual (BAU) would lead to a +4°C temperature rise by 2100.
The equation also fits observed data.
The point isn't to demonstrate that this is the correct equation, but to show that on the same basis as Nordhaus used to choose his own modeling function, very different results can be demonstrated.
Which Keen makes more than abundantly clear:
Contrary to Nordhaus’s assertion that caution is needed “when using [his model] for large temperature increases”, his model is unreliable for temperatures that are well within the levels on which he has made pronouncements about what global warming will do to GDP.
Honestly, I'm not all that interested in it, and am certainly unqualified to suggest improvements to the model. I'd have to go back and read the article more carefully, along with probably a bunch of other material as well, to evaluate it properly. Seems like one of those scenarios where if you torture the data enough it will tell you whatever you want to hear.
It just struck me that both the red and blue traces in the last graph he presents, where he arbitrarily(?) adds another term to the math, are so ridiculous as to not be worth further consideration. If there's a more subtle point, like I said, I'd need to re-read to find it. Either that, or the author needs to bring his lede up front and center. Demonstrating that one bit of math is bad by making up another equally bad one doesn't carry the point as effectively as he was probably hoping it would.
Note the "hard science" qualification -- obviously the Peace and Literature prizes have a controversial history, but disregard those for the moment.