Climate change is going to hammer us financially pretty soon

Global per capita gross domestic product will be down 23% at the turn of the next century if global warming isn’t slowed, the study found. The impact will be more severe in China – average income will shrink 43%-and Mexico, where average income could plunge 73%. Analyzing 50 years of data from around the world, the team demonstrates that there is an optimal temperature of approximately 13 degrees Celsius or 55 Fahrenheit, for economic performance. Once things get hotter than that, the researchers add, economic productivity declines “sharply”.

A single-degree rise in average temperature over India could reduce the country’s per capita growth by about 1 per cent, environmental scientists said today after a global study of the economic fallout of climate change was published. Meanwhile a few already wealthy countries, such as Canada or Sweden, will benefit greatly according to the study, moving closer to the climatic optimum.

He and others also questioned the idea that there is an optimal temperature for economic production. The researchers locate them in two chief places: agriculture and people.

The paper published on Nature magazine, focused on measuring nations’ wealth to examine their transition at times of climate change effects. Researchers have often theorized that richer countries with high levels of technology will be relatively protected from the effects of future climate change, but these new findings suggest otherwise. In other words, there is a body of existing research that’s consistent with the new, more sweeping conclusion of the Nature paper.

In a work culture obsessed with productivity, not even office temperatures can escape study.

“We don’t want to rule out that we could see unprecedented adaptation to hotter temperatures in the future, and we certainly hope we do see it”, Burke said. The researchers established a relationship between climate change and GDP by comparing the results of warm, cool and average years in each country.

According to one of the study’s co-authors, Marshall Burke, an assistant professor at the department of earth system science at Stanford, “People have always been anxious that the effects on people in poor countries would be really negative and we confirmed that”. However, it is important to note that this is based on a scenario in which the world does nothing to curtail global warming – a scenario that is becoming increasingly hard to believe.

The study found that economic growth has a sweet spot: Around 55˚F. It current trends continue, the consequences will be devastating: there is a 63% probability that global GDP will fall by over 10% and a 51% likelihood that it will be lowered by more than 20%. For other countries, they could lose by as much as 73 percent.

Still, Jamieson said the new research does help show that the economic toll of climate change will be bad.

Once they calibrated this analysis, the researchers took the second step, applying it to the mostly widely accepted climate-change scenarios. Burke compared the effect of global warming on economies to a head wind on a cross-country airplane flight.

“What we see is it matters less if you’re rich or poor now”. The effect of agricultural productive is easy to explain: crops grow most productively within a certain temperature range. A cooler world leads to more equitable global growth, offering regions like Africa the chance to “catch up”.

Global warming does not only harm the nature, it could also cause poverty in many nations.

While the authors appear to have conducted a careful analysis, Robert Stavins, an environmental economist at the Harvard Kennedy School, cautions that there is a lot of uncertainty in calculating the long term economic costs of climate change. That means climate change could also worsen global inequality-northern countries are in general already better off than tropical ones. “Individuals are known not extremely touchy to temperature”, said Dr. Hsiang. And he said technological advances will not shield economies.