A hedge fund billionaire....

A hedge fund billionaire, the mayor of New York City, and a former US Treasury Secretary walk into a bar…

The ex-President of Mexico, a Lord economist, and a management consultant are at the Pearly Gates talking to St. Peter…

The President of the World Bank and the Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund are in a lifeboat…

All right, that’s not going to work... This cast of characters is not actually the stuff of comedy. These are all serious people, and the things they are associated with are all serious in nature and scope. And if there was any doubt of the seriousness with which they are typically associated, they all have, over the course of the past fortnight, launched initiatives and taken very public positions on the economics of climate change. It doesn’t get much more serious than that.

Individually, each of these initiatives and pronouncements are be noteworthy. But coming as they do all within 10 days of each other, one might be forgiven in thinking that something is up. What is up, of course, are global average temperatures. With the release of the latest mega-survey of climate change science (the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), serious people are starting to take serious notice.

First, Felipe Calderon (ex-President of Mexico), Lord Nicolas Stern, and a cast of notables have launched a new global initiative called the New Economics of Climate. Lord Stern’s encyclopedic 2007 report on the economics of climate change helped establish that the costs of acting today are much smaller than having to act later. This new initiative is meant to breathe new life into that argument in advance of critical UN talks in 2015, but also to start making a more affirmative case for why action on climate change – done right – can be a winner from an economic perspective.

In Washington, World Bank President Kim and IMF Executive Director Lagarde chose to – in the middle of the annual WB/IMF meetings which bring together the upper echelons of economic policy makers from around the world – deliver a joint workshop on the economics of climate change. Their message was a direct one: the impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately on the world’s poor and all of the gains made in the last 50 years around addressing poverty and development challenges are likely to be wiped out by rising seas, changing agricultural conditions, stressed ecosystems, etc…

And for a more specific look at how climate change is likely to impact the world’s largest economy, Tom Steyer (a San Francisco hedge fund billionaire), Michael Bloomberg (the outgoing mayor of NYC and a billionaire in his own right) and Hank Paulson (ex-US Treasury Secretary and CEO of Goldman Sachs) have announced an initiative called “Risky Business". Their ambition – in some ways the grandest – is to change the economic and political arguments around climate change in the US by establishing the cost – and benefits – of addressing climate change.

Serious challenges require serious responses. We are not yet where we need to be in terms of the scale and ambition of what our governments need to do on climate change. Hopefully these new initiatives will make that action more likely.