Quantifying the continuing cost of the increasing threat of climate change is, roughly speaking, impossible. Even just focusing on the financial impacts is daunting, much less putting a number on human suffering and species extinctions. But there are still things we can learn in the attempt. For example, some oppose action to reduce emissions as “too expensive.” Is that a good argument?

Building on previous efforts, a new study led by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research scientists Nicole Glanemann and Sven Willner attempts a full-on cost-benefit calculation. Like a classic optimization problem, their analysis finds the cheapest combination of mitigation costs and damages—and finds that it’s around 2°C warming.

This kind of analysis requires a few obvious things: the cost of investments that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the economic damage of warming, the mathematical relationship between emissions and warming, and an economic model to drive the whole endeavor.