Global Warming Effects Directly Proportional To Economic Progress; World Will

According to Stanford University assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science, Marshall Burke, “We’re basically throwing away money by not addressing the issue”.

Scientists are confident that the global climate is in for a few serious changes over the next 100 years, and this can affect virtually every aspect of human life on Earth.

When it comes to climate change, the dark truth is that most people couldn’t care less about it crippling the environment. “After that point, growth declines rapidly”. “On the other hand, if you’re already at 13 degrees C, a little extra warming is going to hurt you”.

Researchers noted that when average temperature in a county increases, GDP drops. 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. “While these relationships showed up again and again in the micro data-for example, when looking at agricultural fields or manufacturing plants-they were not showing up in the existing macro-level studies, and we wanted to understand why”. He read the new Nature paper but withheld his judgment until the statistical analysis of the data has been tested.

Published by researchers from Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, the findings use a novel metric to show that “climate change will reshape the global economy, causing a small number of cold countries to perform better and many temperate and hot countries to perform worse”. The data revealed a hill-shaped relationship between economic output and temperature, with output rising until the 55 F threshold and then falling faster and faster at higher temperatures.

“The situation is pretty bleak”, said Sterner. By comparing warm years to normal years, the team was able to chart how individual economies respond to temperature.

“The available pledges have made progress in closing the gap, but they aren’t enough to prevent temperatures from rising beyond 2°C”, Taryn Fransen, project director with the Open Climate Network, a climate change policy tracking coalition in the U.S., told The Telegraph. We also know that society tends to get somewhat insane when the temperature gets hot. “Climate change is not just an environmental issue but geopolitical issue”.

The research, like all economic forecasts on a global scale, is liable to provoke contention, as it looks at one very big, crude measure and discounts all the individual political and worldwide troubles that might beset any particular nation at any time.

The researchers’ findings were stark.

In the poorest 40 percent of countries, climate change will reduce the average income by 75 percent come 2100.

Perhaps more concerning, however, is what could happen in a world where climate change is allowed to continue unmitigated. Other estimates are twice as high. They found that unrestricted global warming would cut expected incomes in 2100 by between 15% and 75%, many times higher than previous estimates. Looking at 166 countries – and taking out changes due to differences in countries (like geographic location or starting wealth) – the researchers analyzed whether a country’s economic performance increased or decreased as temperatures rose or fell.

“Under this hypothesis, the impacts of future warming should lessen over time as more countries become richer”, Burke said.

“(Climate change) is causing major trauma for nearly half the world’s population that’s much poorer than we are. Scientists said that if the temperatures will remain in the range then the countries will have the largest economies in the world.

“We project these countries could be harmed and often harmed dramatically by future increases in warming”, he said. “But we find limited evidence that this is the case”. Burke, Hsiang, & Miguel (Nature 2015) demonstrate the effects of these changes on economies around the world. If the new study means our mitigation efforts are even weaker than previously thought, and we don’t have a proven track record of adaptation, are we setting ourselves up for suffering?